Colby Covington: Fight with Tyron Woodley would have been bigger than Kamaru Usman

Colby Covington believes he lost out on the Tyron Woodley fight.

When Woodley was welterweight champion, Covington (15-1 MMA, 10-1 UFC) continuously called him out, and almost got the opportunity to fight him when he captured the interim welterweight title.

They were briefly linked to unify the strap, but the fight never ended up materializing. With Covington having to undergo nasal surgery, the landscape at 170 moved on.

Woodley ended up facing Darren Till at UFC 228 instead, successfully defending his title. But then he met Kamaru Usman, who took his title, ending his championship reign.

So now Covington will be facing “The Nigerian Nightmare” for the title in the main event of UFC 245 on Dec. 14.

And despite their being some back-and-forth with Usman, and a near altercation at the buffet line of the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, Covington still thinks a fight with Woodley would have been bigger.

“No, it’s definitely not as big a fight as the Woodley fight because of how much promoting I put into that fight,” Covington told MMA Junkie. “I was two years calling him out after every single fight and you know we had the backstory, we used to train at American Top Team, he was under the same roof as Dan Lambert, Dan Lambert is my agent and there’s so many stories. The bad blood we had, also the political line. He’s a liberal snowflake, I’m team MAGA, I’m dropping MAGA bombs out there so it just had so many different angles to the fight with Woodley.”

Even though his fight with Usman is getting the main event billing at the end-of-the-year card in Vegas, Covington says he’s carrying the event, and the only reason people will be watching, is to see him compete.

“This fight with ‘Marty Fake Newsman’ there’s not a lot of angles,” Covington said. “I mean he’s a boring fighter, no one cares about him. The only reason people are going to be tuning in on Dec. 14, it’s because they want to see me win or they want to see me get knocked out but they’re only tuning in to see me, they don’t care about him. So it kinda sucks that I lost the Woodley fight but it is what it is.”