Daniel Cormier doesn’t pull punches on his YouTube channel. If you ever want to hear a rawer version of DC than the one you hear on UFC broadcasts and on DC and The Bad Guy, tune into some of his videos.
Cormier’s most recent video addresses Colby Covington, the aging and fading UFC welterweight veteran who lost to Joaquin Buckley via third-round TKO on Saturday in the UFC Tampa main event.
Covington has become known as much for his brash, obnoxious and antagonistic behavior as he has for his Octagon skills. Now that Covington’s career is on the downturn and his behavior remains despicable, Cormier and others have asked where does he go in his career from here when the gimmick is now working more against him than for him.
Cormier took things a step further as he called Covington out for switching his tune on UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones. Cormier exposed Covington for switching up on Jones and he brought receipts.
“This is Colby Covington when he first started,” Cormier said in his video. “He was on the undercard of a Jon Jones fight. He’s speaking of Jon Jones as if they were best friends in college. Colby—or at least it is perceived to be his feelings towards Jon Jones because he’s very vocal about it—he hates Jones. At least he would have you believe that. But when you watch this right here, you can see what his true feelings were before the gimmick. This was before Colby became that guy, the bad guy: the guy that talks and the guy that’s very vocal and brash and harsh. Take a listen.”
Cormier then plays a clip from a post-fight media session following one of Covington’s wins early in his career.
“He was a really good friend in college,” Covington says in the clip. “We spent two years sharing a bunk bed together. So I was hoping he was going to be here. I thought we were going to get to have a little, you know, coming together again, you know, like in college when we were winning wrestling matches together.”
“Now, that doesn’t seem like the guy that continues to crap on Jones,” Cormier interjects. “This is Colby today,” Cormier said introducing the Covington clip from UFC Tampa fight week on December 12.
“Jon Jones is an absolute disgrace to this earth,” Covington said. “He’s a joke. I think Jon needs to stop ducking Tom Aspinall just like he ducked Ngannou. He ducked Ngannou for years. Now he’s ducking Aspinall. He doesn’t want to fight the guys he knows he’s getting his ass whooped against. I don’t think there’s anything special to Jon Jones. He’s a coward. He’s a cheat, and he’s a woman-beater.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice the seismic shift in tone from Covington when speaking about Jones. Cormier doesn’t hammer Covington too hard for being more two-faced than Harvey Dent. Instead, Cormier focuses more on Covington’s inability to maintain the level of performance excellence necessary to keep the sharks at bay when you’ve spent the better part of your rise as a politically incorrect predator who’s out for blood.
“Now you can see how he has changed, right,” Cormier asks. “From that kid in the beginning that respected Jones to now the guy that hates Jones. Guys, that is all fine and dandy—it really is. It’s all fine and dandy until you start to lose. Until you start to lose, your gimmick can be as big as anything you want in the world. Your idea of how you want people to see you can be big; it can be brash. But ultimately, you gotta win, right?”
Losing is something Covington has done a lot of in his career since 2019. The former UFC interim welterweight champion is on a two-fight losing streak and he’s lost four of his last six fights. He’ll be 37 in February and the heavy-wrestling, super-cardio machine approach just hasn’t been as effective as it was when he was on the rise from 2016 into 2019.
“He [Covington] took shots at the top in terms of [Kamaru] Usman, [Leon] Edwards, Jon Jones, even in a different weight class,” Cormier said. “But now those guys are still at the top as his time starts to pass him by. What do you think happens? I don’t know, man. I think this is very interesting because I truly do love wrestling, and I do love having a personality that’s bigger than your own. You know what they tell me at The Volume? When we did this deal, they said, ‘We want Daniel Cormier. We want you to turn that volume up a little bit.’ Colby turned the volume all the way to max. But by doing that, while you get more eyes on you in a positive way, you also build a whole bunch of enemies that wait for the downfall. And right now, it seems like we’re right in the middle of a downfall. How does Covington handle that?”
The same way he’s dished it out. He may not have any other choice.
