It's not often someone goes toe-to-toe with Mystic Mac when it comes to predictions.
With just weeks remaining before a truly monstrous card, the first ever for the UFC in New York and headlined by the biggest draw in MMA, the mind games have well and truly kicked off in the media.
We heard recently that UFC lightweight champ Eddie Alvarez thinks Conor McGregor is "just a left hand", which sounds like a mistake many of the Irishman's previous opponents have made, but the Philly native is supremely confident ahead of this fight, so much so he's given an exact prediction for how things will go while speaking to Fox Sports.
McGregor has given one of his famous pre-fight predictions already, stating that he will finish his opponent in the first round, but Alvarez expects it to last longer than that.
I think we do it under the nine-minute mark.
Big, big heavy shots, he goes down and then submission.
I can see it ending much like the (Nate) Diaz fight where I land the heavy shot and then I finish with a submission.
A submission victory late in the second, almost identical to Conor's loss to Nate Diaz.
It's clear that fight back in March has given Eddie Alvarez great hope ahead of the bout on November 12th, as he continued to explain that he believes Conor struggles with adversity.
Admitting that McGregor is a dangerous fighter when things are going his way, he believes that if he can upset him early on, then he will break as he called his heart into question.
From what I've seen in the past and what he's done in the past, (his heart) is very questionable and I'm not the only one who's questioned it.
I think he has quit in him and I think it takes a tad of adversity and him to get into a little bit of a fight to pull it out of him.
On November 12, I'm going to pull it out of him and I'm going to show it to millions of people and the crowd. Everybody's going to see it. We're going to reveal the quit.
Alvarez, and his entire camp, are supremely confident.
None of this is likely to worry McGregor, and we'll hear exactly what each fighter thinks of their opponents when the serious media run-in kicks off in about two weeks time, although the UFC did whet the appetite this afternoon with the release of the extended preview for UFC 205.
[via Fox Sports]
