Eric Nicksick says doctor was adamant Francis Ngannou should have pulled out of UFC 270

Francis Ngannou was dealing with plenty of adversity heading into UFC 270, but he still managed to pull through.

Ngannou (17-3 MMA, 12-2 UFC) unified his heavyweight title with interim champ Ciryl Gane (10-1 MMA, 7-1 UFC) in Saturday’s main event, making pivotal tactical adjustments that helped him turn the fight around and earn the unanimous decision win.

Not only did Ngannou deal with contract issues with the UFC and drama with his former coach, Fernand Lopez, but the champion revealed post-fight that he came into the bout with a grade 3 MCL tear, as well as damage on his ACL and MPFL.

His head coach, Erick Nicksick, found himself in a tough spot before the fight: Should he encourage Ngannou to withdraw, or should he risk having him go into the biggest fight of his career compromised?

“I was a nervous wreck,” Nicksick told MMA Junkie Radio. “I think a lot of the things that my head was telling me was to pull out of the fight, and I just didn’t like the way that the knee injury was and the situation that the opponent that we had with the particular injury that we had. Obviously we did want to get into some wrestling, but I didn’t know how we were going to be able to wrestle without having the cardio the last three-and-a-half weeks, as well as the stability of the knee, and I’ve just got to give all the credit to Francis. That guy’s will power, his mental capacity, what he wanted to do, he just unwavered the entire camp.”

Nicksick says a visit to a doctor in Los Angeles only made things more difficult. With Ngannou having sustained the knee injury 25 days out of the fight, he was advised to pull out so he wouldn’t risk causing permanent damage to his knee.

But Ngannou was dead set on competing, and despite his concern, Nicksick fully supported him.

“We had kind of that come-to-Jesus moment last Friday before we left,” Nicksick said. “We got word from a second opinion doctor out here in L.A. that he was adamant that Francis should pull out. He thought that he could ultimately lose a year-and-a-half to two years after a full knee reconstruction surgery if that leg would have gone wrong, something would have gone wrong. So we got that word last Friday. We had practice that day so we all met at the (UFC Performance Institute), and that’s kind of when I just said, ‘Dude, what are we doing here? I love you, bro. You’re my brother. But as your coach, I do have to tell you what I think is right, and this is what I feel is right in this situation.’

“‘But if you as the fighter say that you’re going to fight, I’m going to have your back 110 percent. But I can’t live with myself without telling you how I truly feel. This isn’t about anything other than your safety and your legacy, in my opinion.’ So we agreed upon what we were going to do was, we were going to come to California fight week, (and) we were going to meet with the doctor out here in L.A. The moment we landed, we went right to his office and basically waited outside and he came out and I could tell by his face, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’re fighting.’ Once we knew that, I didn’t bring his knee up once. I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore because that, as far as I was concerned, was behind us. We’re going to fight with what we’ve got.”

Gane got off to a good start, outpointing Ngannou in the first two rounds, which he was awarded by two of the three judges. But the game-changing moment happened when Ngannou caught a Gane kick in Round 3 and slammed him to the ground. That is when Ngannou realized he had the perfect route to victory, one that didn’t require him to put any weight on his injured knee.

“Right away when I saw Gane’s reactions to the ground control, his defensive things, I knew we had something there,” Nicksick said. “It was actually funny at the end of Round 3. I was walking in the corner and I was putting the stool down and I looked at Francis and I go, ‘We’ve got something now, don’t we?’ and Francis shook his head and was like, ‘We sure do.’ I was like, ‘All right, let’s get back to it then.’

“So by being able to score that takedown in Round 3, I really wanted a lot of level-change motion because I knew that the level changes now had some validity. He had to worry about getting taken down, so that should open up some more of our strikes, meaning the overhand or the level-change feints to overhands, as well as, again, our ground game stuff. So we got right back to it in Round 4 and then obviously in Round 5 there was that sequence with the sweep, but we knew that. We knew if we could keep him on the ground, that we had a path to victory then.”