Conor McGregor still has his sights set on a showdown with Michael Chandler when he finally makes his UFC return in 2024, but he’ll be defying the odds by attempting to get back to a championship level after suffering a devastating broken leg in his last outing.
It’s been a tumultuous few years for the former two-division UFC champion, who took over the sports world with his boxing match with Floyd Mayweather in 2017 followed by arguably the biggest fight in UFC history when he clashed with Khabib Nurmagomedov one year later. Since that time, McGregor has gone 1-2 in MMA, with his career shelved for the past two years after breaking his leg in a trilogy fight against Dustin Poirier back in 2021.
UFC color commentator Joe Rogan can’t help but wonder if McGregor will ever be the same again, especially considering how other athletes have struggled mightily in the wake of similar injuries.
“No one comes back from that,” Rogan said on his podcast. “No one has ever come back from that catastrophic leg break. The shin break. Not a single athlete has come back from it and performed at the same level. Anderson Silva’s the only guy who came back and fought multiple times, and he was not the same guy.”
During his time away, McGregor dropped out of the UFC’s anti-doping program, which led many to believe he may have used some kind of performance-enhancing drug to aid in his recovery from the broken leg.
As he prepares for his return, McGregor re-entered the testing pool currently handled by USADA, but Rogan has no problem if the Irish superstar used something deemed illegal in his recovery if it actually helped him get past such a devastating injury.
“I certainly support guys taking things to recover from injuries like Conor did with his leg injury,” Rogan said. “One-hundred percent. No question. I’m 100 percent all-in on that. That’s the only way.
“They just started testing him recently. He was jacked and also, that’s when you should do it, when you have something like a catastrophic leg injury. I mean, he’s got rods in his legs, he’s had multiple surgeries. It’s not just one. It doesn’t always heal right and it breaks again. Like Dan Hooker, he has a rod in his arm. He broke his arm in a fight, I think it was the Jalin Turner fight, so he had it fixed, he had rods put in it and he just broke it again. So now he has to have a second surgery. They’re doing some new procedure to try and get the bones to fuse because the bones didn’t fuse correctly. The rods are the only thing holding it in place and it snapped.”
While all signs are pointing towards McGregor fighting Chandler in his first fight back in three years, Rogan would prefer to see the Irish superstar take on a slightly less dangerous opponent to get his feet wet again.
Of course, he understands that McGregor has never backed down from any level of competition since first arriving in the UFC, but Rogan knows that coming back from that kind of layoff coupled with a bad injury could potentially spell disaster.
“I would want a tune up fight, 100 percent,” Rogan said. “I would not want him going right in there against Islam Makhachev. That’s him. That’s why he’s a champion. He’s a warrior. One of the things he said about the Dustin Poirier, the second fight but the first of the most recent ones where he got knocked out, he said, ‘I was inactive, it caught up to me, I could feel it while I was in there. My timing wasn’t as good.’ You need to be active to be at the highest levels of mixed martial arts competition.
“I just don’t see how you can take two years off, multiple surgeries, get on juice, get off juice and jump in there against the best in the world. Maybe he can do it, but if I was his coach and the option was available, I’d say let’s get someone who’s not even in the top 15. Let’s get some guy who is beatable but a good test. We’ll call it a tune-up fight. We get to see how you perform. This guy gets an opportunity to beat Conor McGregor, you get to test your skills again and feel the lights and feel the pressure, get your timing back, have that fight, [then] six months later you have a big fight.”