BTL | Countdown To Conor McGregor's Return, Midyear Grades, Awards, More

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**Mike Heck** (1:01)
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All right, everybody, happy Thursday. Mixing things up a little bit. It is July 2nd, 2026 And it is indeed a heck of a morning. Hello there, everybody. I am Mike Heck. Hope you're all having a wonderful day. If you're in the United States, we're just a couple days away from Independence Day and 4th of July for a lot of people out there in the US. It is the last day of work for the week. It's not like that for everybody, for most of you, so enjoy it. But we are here to discuss a whole bunch going on. It is an off week, obviously, for the UFC and major mixed martial arts. I know BKFC is a card in Philadelphia, but mid-year award season, I know we already dropped our mid-year fighter, or excuse me, fighter of the mid-year. It is Justin Gaethje. It was a unanimous choice by the panel. Carlos Olberg came in at number two, which I'm flabbergasted by. I gotta be honest with you, he was in my top five, but he certainly wasn't number two on my list. Sean Strickland would be number two on my list. I thought that was pretty obvious, but the rest of the panel did not agree with that, and I have no idea where people voted. So today was the first of many of the awards that are gonna come out. We have, I believe, Fight of the Year coming out tomorrow. And then Knockout, I believe, is on Saturday, and Submission on Sunday. So you'll have all of our awards. We'll roll them out if you guys have questions about them. If you have thoughts about them, let us know. And let's go to the peeps, ladies and gentlemen. Of course, the Super Traders get to the front of the line, and Lazarne kicks us off, or Lazar, excuse me. With no fights this weekend, and the focus being International Fight Week, what do you make of integrated Conor in his videos wrestling? I honestly haven't seen any of his wrestling content at all. So you're asking probably the wrong guy. I'm sorry that you spent five bucks in that sense, but I mean, it's obviously pretty smart, right? Keep Max guessing. I'm sure Max is gonna be prepared for all that stuff. So yeah, I think, I think the anticipation for this fight is, it's getting bigger. At least that's the feeling that I'm getting. More people are asking about it now than they were probably a couple of weeks ago, but obviously that had to do with the White House card and everything else going on. But I've been getting asked about the Conor fight a ton this week, no matter where I go, it is, it is being brought up to me. So we're starting to get to the mom test levels here. And I think it's actually pretty smart of the UFC. I mean, typically they don't do a card. They're certainly not going to do a 4th of July card in this day and age, but having a week between Baku and this is like the best gift the UFC could give themselves. Now we can just build this thing up over the next several days as opposed to, oh, here's another Apex card and we'll just roll into International Fight Week and let's roll into the Conor McGregor fight. So the anticipation is definitely building up, especially with no UFC event this weekend. So Cosmo, thank you. What did you make a Big John's interview with AH.? I didn't watch a lot of it. I saw some clips, obviously. And to me, this was and I like John a lot. I've talked to John for numerous projects over the years. He's always been very respectful to me and vice versa. I was not surprised by any of it. There was no like real revelations that I learned in this conversation. This was John defending his guys. But obviously still at the whole, at the same time understanding that there are flaws and there are issues and people make quote unquote mistakes. Some of it was a little ridiculous to me. Like at least, I mean, maybe there were some things that I missed, but you would think like the more pertinent points in these conversations are going to be put in the clips on social media. The defending of like the Herb Dean thing, like and just saying, well, it's not really the media, it's just fans. Just complaining, essentially, but he obviously understands, like, do fans want perfection? Did is that a fair thing to ask for? Sure, but when you are a referee allowing a fighter to literally grab the back of somebody's hair and nothing is being done about it, that's not a mistake to me, okay? A kick to the ding ding can be a mistake. A shot to the back of the head during a flurry, a mistake. The occasional eye poke, yeah, I understand it's a mistake. A fence grab is not a mistake. Literally grabbing a man bun the back of somebody's hair, then issuing multiple warnings, and then still not doing anything about it, that's not a mistake. That is you making a choice saying, you know what? I just don't care. I'm just gonna let this go. I don't wanna enforce this rule because maybe a fighter won't get the second half of his paycheck, and that's a problem. That is a problem, and that's why, like, Jett and I used to get so much crap for this, but we used to always say, like, dude, just go cheat. Just go in there and cheat. They're not gonna do anything about it. They're not. The first warning for a fight, and we talk about this all the time, it's not in the cage. You get your first warning backstage before the fight even happens. You are told the rules. Here is your first warning. Don't do this, don't do this, don't do that. And then you go out there and you do it again. Now you got your second warning. And if it happens again, it's a third warning. And we've seen four, fifth, sixth warnings without anything being done about it. A egregiousness of grabbing the back of somebody's hair and no point being taken, not even like an advanced position, nothing. Again, that is not a mistake. That is a choice the referee made to not intervene. It is your job to intervene. It is your job to make a choice. It is your job to make a decision and make a call. That is literally your job. So it's, I don't agree with a lot of what was said. I understand why John is taking the stance he should. He's certainly not going to go on Ariel's show and be like, Herb Dean sucks. I agree with what everybody is saying about him. And everybody is saying this about him. Everybody except for, apparently, Muhammad Makhachev is a Herb Dean fan out there. But, Herb's been awful this year. He's been terrible. He's been bad. He's been bad for a while. And everybody's coming on and talking about it. But no, John doesn't strike me as a guy who's going to go on Ariel's show and say, no, we should kick him out. He shouldn't be a referee anymore. No, John's not that kind of guy. But again, I learned some stuff and yeah. Lazy, I like Three Man Panel weighing in with John, Big John Josh and John Morgan way better than the Ariel interview. Big John was a lot more concise. Off to check that out. Another one from Lazy Beto. A day later, how are you feeling about the brown trade to the Sixers? It sucks. It's a shitty trade. I, we didn't get, like, we certainly didn't get nearly enough of what I expected to get out of trading Jalen Brown. My big thing is, I want to shut this guy out before I talk about it, because I did read, I spent some time reading quite the article. Where is it? Tom Haberstrow from Yahoo wrote an article that was entitled, quote, did the Celtics give away Jalen Brown, why analytics don't see Philly's new star as elite of elite? And I was like, all right, I'm going to read this and see if I feel any better about it. And I'm not going to say that it made me feel better about it, but at least I was like, okay, if we're looking at this like the Moneyball lens, then it's not that bad. It just, you could have got more, you could have got more picks. Paul George is like, Paul is well beyond like, I'm going to lead this team to the promised land. So we could be like a good little side piece, I guess, to what they're trying to accomplish. I do like some of the other moves they're making, but we're just going to have to wait and see. My first reaction was like, man, the Celtics got, I don't know how to feel about the Celtics. I liked the moves they made. I don't say, they didn't get way worse, but they certainly aren't better than they were a day ago at this time. And the 76ers are way better than they were a day ago at this time. So they're probably going to be the odds on favorite to make the Eastern Conference Finals the least. Like, they're definitely, like, they're going to be favored to go there. Who will they play? I don't know. But wouldn't it be something if we got a sixers, Celtics, Eastern Conference Finals? Now, that is, that's what the world wants to see. That's where we'll get our answer. But yeah, I was bummed about it. And we'll see. I mean, just going to try to stay positive here. Masters, when is Sophie Cunningham coming to MMA so she could point at people and tell them off like Josh Hockett? I don't know. She's probably making way more money playing in the WNBA and sponsorships and all that stuff. So Joseph, how's the UFC 330 card looking? We're about five weeks out and I don't see Sean Brady or Joe Pfeiffer booked yet or rumored. Let's pull up UFC 330 I know they just announced a bunch of new fights. We have Makhachev, Garry, Dern Robertson and I kind of feel like I already know how that fight's gonna go. Blanchfield, Jasson, Jasdivisius, Edson Barboza, Esavan Rievich, dang.