Dana White Reveals Tyron Woodley vs. Nate Diaz Was Never Actually Going to Happen

As much as welterweight champion Tyron Woodley might want to fight Nate Diaz at UFC 219, the fight was never going to happen.

That’s according to UFC president Dana White, who addressed the rumored matchup on Tuesday after rumors about the fight began swirling over the past two weeks.

Woodley teased that he might have a fight coming up before the end of the year and before long he was calling out Diaz for not signing a contract to face him after he had already agreed to the matchup.

White says the entire situation was blown out of proportion after a UFC attorney suggested the matchup and then took it upon himself to reach out to Diaz and Woodley to ask if they might be interested in the fight.

Woodley accepted immediately but then White found out what was happening and he quickly threw water on the entire unfortunate situation.

“One of our attorneys here started playing matchmaker and he has a good rapport with the Diaz brothers and he basically said ‘what if you could fight Tyron Woodley’ and me and Sean [Shelby] were like how does he deserve to fight Tyron Woodley? There’s a list of guys that are waiting to fight Tyron Woodley and this dude’s going to fight? So he kind of went off the reservation a little bit and started playing matchmaker,” White explained. “That’s why you started hearing Woodley saying ‘I got an offer to fight Nate Diaz’ and we’re like no there was never a fight.

“That’s the deal. There really was never an offer for Woodley vs. Diaz. It’s not true. It was never offered.”

White admits that Diaz hasn’t accepted a single fight the UFC has offered him since losing to Conor McGregor at UFC 202 in August 2016, but he deserves absolutely no blame for this fight not coming together because it should have never happened in the first place.

“It was a nightmare. None of that was true,” White said. “That was just a guy who works here who went off the reservation and asked those guys a question.”