Dana White Slams Francis Ngannou After Abysmal Outing at UFC 226

Less than six months ago, Francis Ngannou was one of the most talked about fighters on the entire UFC roster and he was being painted as the company’s next superstar.

That all came crashing down around him in January when the hulking heavyweight was soundly defeated by former heavyweight champion Stipe Miocic in a five round decision at UFC 220.

On Saturday night at UFC 226, Ngannou made his return to action with hopes of getting back into the title race as he faced fellow top 10 ranked heavyweight Derrick Lewis.

What resulted was nothing short of bizarre as Ngannou refused to engage throughout the entire 15 minute fight, landing only 11 significant strikes over three rounds en route to a unanimous decision loss.

While there’s no exact science to figure out what went wrong with Ngannou between his stunning knockout win over Alistair Overeem last December to a pair of losses in his last two fights, UFC president Dana White has his own working theory.

“Horrible,” White said about Ngannou’s performance. “I think that he had a pretty quick rise here and obviously the fight over Alistair Overeem catapulted him. Everybody was talking about him. I thought he was going to be the next guy. I think his ego ran away with him big time. I can tell you his ego absolutely ran away with him. The minute that happens to you in the fight game, you see what happens. You start to fall apart.

“I had some personal encounters with him as did other people in the organization and this guy’s ego was just so out of control. Before the Stipe [Miocic] fight, he took off and went to France. Didn’t even really train for that fight and you see the results. Then he comes back and he did train but ego is what hurt Francis Ngannou.”

Ngannou didn’t make any kind of post fight statement following his loss to Lewis on Saturday night.

The Cameroon born heavyweight did make a change of training camps ahead of this fight as he began working full time with Syndicate MMA out of Las Vegas.

Whether that had something to do with his lackluster outing is unknown but Ngannou’s stock has definitely dropped after losing two fights in a row in 2018 after starting his UFC career with five straight wins.