“I don’t think the judges like Nick. He comes off, he talks in the ring… Carlos was running at one point, and Nick slapped him in the face said, ‘Quit running.’ We were there for a dogfight. Carlos said he’d provide for the fans a dogfight, a great fight where they were going to go at it. That was not a dogfight. It takes two to make a dogfight. One guy running away is not a dogfight… I don’t know what the judges were looking at. They’ve never liked Nick in Vegas. They’ve never voted for him in a decision. The only one was the BJ Penn fight, and he almost had to kill BJ to get that one. I don’t think they like his attitude, a guy that’s going to go out there and talk. I think they think he’s disrespectful. They’re going to find a reason to judge against him. I don’t think he can get fair judging in that state at all.”

— Cesar Gracie on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani claiming judges are biased against Nick Diaz in Nevada

First and foremost, let me say that Diaz did not get robbed. This wasn’t Shogun-Machida I. It was a close fight and I think you could make an argument for either fighter. That said, there is certainly incompetent judging in MMA. It happens all the time. But biased judging? I don’t know. I’ve never seen any evidence of that, but I’ve never been in a position to either. It wouldn’t surprise me, but to suggest Nick can’t win a decision in Vegas because the judges don’t like him without providing any evidence to support such a theory is kind of like throwing around baseless steroid and greasing accusations. They’re pointless without proof.

Moving on, Gracie also took aim at Greg Jackson and their fight strategies during the interview.

“It’s one thing to avoid standing in the pocket, it’s one thing to know how to dodge punches and kicks, and be somewhat elusive and have great defense,” he said. “It’s another thing to turn your back and run from a fighter. That’s completely different. You shouldn’t be telling your fighter to fight like that. I think it’s a disgrace and a shame. I’ve said this before: I don’t like that camp. I’m not going to take that back.”

Greg Jackson joined the show right after Gracie hung up. He didn’t specifically respond to Gracie’s comments, but he did defend the game plan they employed to beat Nick Diaz.

“It’s not like we reinvented the wheel here with this game plan,” Jackson said. “A stick-and-move game plan against a guy that’s such an amazing fighter and such a tough guy as Diaz, for me is a no-brainer. If you look at the numbers, we hit him many more times than he hit us.”

“The criticism I guess I heard this morning was that Carlos was running,” Jackson said. “He was running back to the middle of the Octagon and hitting him. You can’t really say he’s running, because he hit him more times. So that argument doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“He’s amazing when he gets you up against the fence,” Jackson said of Diaz. “He’s amazing when he starts rolling on those combinations. So we left the party when that happened and then we started the party again and were able to land a lot more shots than he was. It’s pretty cut and dry to me. …If you sit there and go toe-to-toe with him, man, he’s just so tough. His combinations flow so beautifully. He switches from the body to the head so well. There’s no reason for us to play that game.”

Jackson also made it clear that if GSP and Condit do fight next, he will not be cornering either fighter. Interestingly enough though, for Jon Jones vs. Rashad Evans, he might be changing his mind about cornering Jones. He still considers Rashad a friend, but since he’s not coming back to their camp, he feels he needs to be loyal to his team too.

Image via Esther Lin for MMA Fighting

Condit told Ariel Helwani right after the fight that he would rather just wait for GSP and his manager, Malki Kawa, more or less echoed that sentiment today on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani, basically stating that they’re moving past Nick Diaz.

“At this point, [a rematch] is not something we’re looking to do,” he said. “We’re looking for Georges. People forget, Carlos waited a long time to get this fight. He was moved around, and shuffled around between fights. He won the fight. It doesn’t interest us at all. I think clearly and decisively, he won the fight. Even [UFC president] Dana [White] scored it for him. All of the opinions that matter scored Carlos as winner.”

“It was a performance that was excellent,” Kawa said. “He picked apart a very formidable fighter. Two judges saw it four rounds to one, and one saw it three to two. The fact that he didn’t stand and bang with him? I’m sorry, not every fighter has to do that. He did what he had to do, and that goes to show me that this guy is mature, he’s fighting fights that are smart. People are like, ‘Oh, Carlos is not a finisher.’ The guy threw how many spinning elbows? How many spinning back fists? He threw a flying knee. He tried to finish Nick Diaz when the time and the opening was there. I can’t find a flaw in his performance.”

“Carlos is a fighter,” Kawa said. “At the end of the day, this is not a guy who wants to sit around and wait. He wants to fight. You never know. Right now, the idea is that we want Georges St-Pierre. The goal is to fight Georges St-Pierre. He wants to be the best in the world, so that’s the fight that interests us at this moment.”

You can’t really blame them. Condit doesn’t have much to gain and lot to lose by getting back in the cage with Nick Diaz before taking his shot at Georges St. Pierre.

To be honest, other than really wanting to see GSP vs. Diaz and a rematch being the only possible avenue to that at this point, I really don’t want to sit and watch Condit “stick-and-move” (Greg Jackson’s words) for another 25 minutes while Nick chases him around the cage. And I sure as heck don’t want to pay for it. Condit played it smart and got the win. Good for him, but I’d rather spend my $50 on guys who are gonna get after it no matter what’s on the line.

Image via Twitter.com/danawhite

Following the fight Koscheck revealed that he was leaving the American Kickboxing Academy, the prestigious camp in San Jose where he had trained for nearly eight years. What he didn’t do was explain why he was leaving, but he certainly opened up about it in an interview with MMA Weekly yesterday. Koscheck said there was one simple reason why he left and that reason is lead trainer Javier Mendez. In short, Koscheck had grown sick and tired of Mendez blaming everyone but himself whenever an AKA fighter lost.

“There’s one reason I’m leaving San Jose AKA and that’s because of Javier Mendez,” Koscheck stated. “He’s the only reason I’m leaving that gym. It almost hurts me because I love training with those guys, I love training with (Jon) Fitch, and (Mike) Swick and Cain (Velasquez) and (Daniel) Cormier, and (Justin) Wilcox and all those guys, they are my brothers, and it hurts me to have to make this decision for me because the fact that it’s like splitting up the family.”

“This goes back from quite a bit, and history repeats itself. Whenever you have a guy for example whenever I had the loss against (Thiago) Alves and I took the fight on short notice with him, and after the fight I had a lot of friends come up to me and calling me saying ‘have you read this interview with Javier Mendez?’ and talking about me and my game plan,” Koscheck said.

“So I went online and I read this interview and I started to notice after all my teammates lost, it was the same thing. They didn’t listen to the game plan, that he deferred it away from himself, and he threw us under the bus basically saying that we didn’t listen to him and he tries to make himself look good, so it doesn’t reflect on him us losing.”

“I’ve lost a lot of respect for Javier Mendez as a coach, as a person, because if you go back and listen to the history of the interviews of him after AKA guys have lost, the interviews he does, go back and look at the Cain Velasquez (fight), go back and look at the Josh Koscheck (fight), the other guys on that team, and see if you can find interviews where he refers to ‘Oh I did my job’ to make himself look good and they didn’t do theirs. That’s not a coach.”

Koscheck went on to say that his last few camps have been horrible and he’s basically trained himself due to the rift with Mendez, so he’s decided to stay closer to home in Fresno and train there. He still loves all of his AKA teammates like “brothers” and hopes to bring them in when he needs training partners. And no, he hasn’t changed his stance on fighting Jon Fitch. Kos says would move up in weight or even walk away before he would fight Fitch, even it was for a title shot.

Image via Esther Lin for MMA Fighting

“During the fight, I felt like I won four out of the five rounds,” he today told MMAjunkie.com Radio. “I watched it yesterday, and it looked a little bit closer.

“I probably would have given Nick two (rounds) and myself three.”