[autotag]Josh Thomson[/autotag] believes [autotag]Colby Covington[/autotag] has never been the same fighter since parting ways with American Top Team.
Covington split with his longtime gym in 2020 after multiple rifts with then-teammates Jorge Masvidal and Dustin Poirier. Covington (17-5 MMA, 12-5 UFC) has since been training at MMA Masters, but his coaches, Daniel Valverde and Cesar Carneiro, were not in his corner this past Saturday as he suffered a third-round doctor stoppage TKO loss to Joaquin Buckley in the UFC on ESPN 63 headliner at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Fla.
Thomson believes Covington is no longer getting high-level training and that his recent performances have reflected that.
“I’m not going to take anything away from Joaquin Buckley,” Thomson said on his “Weighing-In” podcast, “but when you train at a prestigious gym like American Top Team, and you’ve found your way out of it, and now you’re running your own camp and doing your own thing in a smaller facility without a whole lot of people to train with that are at the top level, when you just left the gym that had a plethora of world-class fighters there – you saw it (at UFC on ESPN 63). I don’t know if it’s the age as much. I know he’s older, but let’s be honest: Within two fights, he doesn’t look like the same person.
“Since he’s left American Top Team, he doesn’t look like the same person. After half of the first round, he was taking deep breaths. I don’t want to say he was winded. He was having a hard time catching his second wind or breaking that first wind. That can be common if he didn’t warm up well enough in the back. … But not having the talent that he needs to kind of help him push his pace in training is what I feel like I’m seeing right now. I’m seeing a fighter who is having a hard time setting a pace that he’s not able to do inside the cage against world-class fighters because he doesn’t have world-class fighters to train with anymore.”
Covington, 36, now has lost three of his past four outings and is on a two-fight losing streak for the first time in his career.
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For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC on ESPN 63.