Joe Rogan's Post Fight Thoughts on Tony Ferguson vs. Justin Gaethje

But there's also something to just the spectacle of Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaetschy just going at it. I mean, like wild five round slugfest with no audience. Do you think that fight would have been different if a crowd was there? No. No. No, I don't think so. Maybe, but I don't think so. It's possible. I think Justin had a game plan and he executed it brilliantly. And I think Ferguson, I mean, he's always going to be Tony Ferguson. He's one of the toughest men that's ever walked the face of the earth. But I think he was preparing for a grappler. He's preparing for Khabib Nurmagomedov and that fight didn't take place. It was supposed to take place in April. So he had been training for Khabib. By the way, this is the fifth time that fight was canceled. The fifth time the fight with Tony and Khabib was canceled. So Tony's been training for Khabib for fucking years, right? So he's ready for this elite grappler. It takes everybody down and smashes them. He's trying to, he's sitting in a cut from the bottom. He's thinking of submitting them and scrambling and getting leg locks and all these different things that he's thinking of. And then he's fighting an all American wrestler who does not want to go to the ground and was nasty striking. So it's a totally different game plan. And he has to make an adjustment over a period of just a few weeks. And so Justin's fight is, I mean, Justin always fights the same way. So Justin's adjustments weren't nearly as big as Tony's. Tony had to make some big adjustments, but Justin just fought a masterpiece. The way he fought was just magnificent. And he listened to his coaches so well. There's a point during the fight where Trevor Whitman is telling him, you're hitting them too hard. You're swinging for the bleachers. He goes, just take about 10% off your punches, hit him with good, clean shots. And he immediately made that adjustment. And then his cardio leveled out because he was getting tired towards the end of the second. And because he was just throwing just bombs. You're trying to take Tony Ferguson's head off, but you can't knock Tony out with one shot. He's inhumanly tough, inhumanly tough. So Justin backs it off a little bit and just is throwing clean shots and then winds up just dominating them. And then they'd stop it in the fifth round. What's the one thing you learned? Was there something you took away from this experience that you didn't take away from any other fight? It was interesting. It was interesting. I felt very, very fortunate to be there. I'm like, out of all the people that could be here to watch one of the greatest fights of all time. I felt super fortunate that I was one of those people that got to be there. I felt like real fortunate for that. Like everything about it, I was like, I was like, take it in the moment and just like really cherishing it. I'm like, wow, this is amazing. Like not a lot of people get to do this. Not a lot of people get to experience this. Not a lot of people get to do commentary for the UFC period, but to do commentary for championship fights in this arena where there's no one there. So we're in a 15,000 seat arena and there's maybe 10 people in the audience. So why didn't you arena that big? We were talking about that. We were like, why can't we do this? We could have done this in the hotel. We could have got a conference room and set up an octagon in there. Like literally. Yeah, I was wondering why they did that, but is it a spectacle of having a big arena just to say you did it? I think there's something to that to let everybody know, hey, these are strange, strange times. You know, we're in the middle of this health crisis. So this is the response to this health crisis. We're going to do this shit in this arena.