Belal Muhammad sees Strickland as an “easy fight”: “I’ll beat him up”

UFC welterweight champion Belal Muhammad would not hesitate to move up to middleweight to fight Sean Strickland.

Muhammad (24-3 MMA, 15-3 UFC) is not a huge fan of Strickland (29-6 MMA, 16-6 UFC) and his fighting style. He is confident that he would be able to handle him if they ever faced each other and believes that the former middleweight champion is all fake and all real.

“I beat him,” Muhammad told Submission Radio of Strickland. “I literally go in there and beat him. When I think of tough fights, Sean is not one of them. I think he would be an easy fight for me. He beats a lot of guys with endurance; I have better endurance than him. He beats a lot of guys with jabs; I box better than him. He beats guys with teeps, but those guys fight him a certain way. They don't fight him smart. Costa was backing up the whole time and then just taking those teep kicks. Even with Adesanya, he was backing up the whole time most of the time.

“And even that fight wasn't that great of a fight, was it? If Sean hadn't landed the cross, he could have lost by a boring decision, even though his trainer in his corner told him, 'Sean, you're about to lose by a boring decision,' even though he landed the cross. I think people just think about his last 10 seconds of every fight, and he goes crazy, and people say, 'Oh, Sean is wild, man, and he says wild things.' But he fights safely, and he fights not to get hit, and he fights not to lose. So, I think I'm going to go in there and break him with pressure, and honestly, I'm going to make it look easy.”

Muhammad wants to clean up his division first and regardless of whether Strickland manages to regain the middleweight title or not, he would jump at the opportunity to fight him.

“Oh man, I would love to fight Sean so much,” Muhammad said. “There don't even have to be belts on the line. I would just fight him just to fight at 185 because he's not going down to 170 anymore. But yeah, that would be the fight I would want at 185. I think for myself now, it's building a legacy. So when you look at the names that I have on my record and the guys I've fought, there's a lot of the big veterans in there, right? There's 'Wonderboy,' Maia, Gilbert Burns, Luque, even Randy Brown, Sean Brady and now Leon Edwards. I think maybe two more. Those young guns, right? There's Shavkat (Rakhmonov), then I think Ian Garry or (Jack Della Maddalena). One of those guys will move on.

“One of those guys either has to fight each other or win against Kamaru (Usman) or somebody else. Or it could be Kamaru, and then I think I could start talking about somebody else, because I had to go the long way to get here, right? I had to beat so many big names, and like I said, I have four top-five wins, and when you look at it, at some point it's going to be like I'm going to have to do a rematch. Now there's going to be another rematch. But I think after two, I can start talking about it. I think it just depends on who the champion is or who's up there, right? Because if it was Sean, I would definitely want that fight, and I would be begging for that fight. But I don't think he's going to touch gold anymore. The guy sucks.”