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Sean Brady 'can't bet against' welterweight champion Belal Muhammad at UFC 315
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Sean Brady won’t doubt UFC welterweight champion Belal Muhammad ahead of his first title defense.
Muhammad (24-3 MMA, 15-3 UFC) takes on Jack Della Maddalena (17-2 MMA, 7-0 UFC) May 10 in the UFC 315 (ESPN+ pay-per-view, ESPN, ESPN+) main event from Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Brady (17-1 MMA, 7-1 UFC) suffered his lone-career loss to Muhammad by TKO at UFC 280, and admits the champion has continued to silence doubters during his 11-fight unbeaten streak.
“Jack can knock out anybody,” Brady said on “The Ariel Helwani Show.” “Obviously, that’s been shown. He’s a very hard puncher. But man – you can’t bet against Belal. He’s gone out there and proved that he can beat anybody in the world and he has.
“So you have to admire that, and you have to respect that. And yeah, I’m going to favor him, especially if you go look at how the Jack fight was going with Gilbert (Burns) until that last minute. So I think Belal has a good chance for sure.”
Brady’s next fight comes against Leon Edwards (22-4 MMA, 14-3 UFC), who Muhammad dethroned to become champion at UFC 304. Brady meets Edwards March 18 in the UFC Fight Night 255 headliner at The O2 in London.
Edwards pointed to the middle-of-the-night timing of his fight against Muhammad as a factor in his performance, but Brady says their fight would have likely played out the same way regardless.
“I think it would go that same way,” Brady said. “If you go back and look at Leon’s – even from his early fights, he’s a very good kickboxer, a very good striker, but he has been known to get taken down and kind of getting held down early on in his career by Claudio Silva. When him and Vicente Luque fought, Vicente had some success in the first round.
“He’s a striker. He has very good takedown defense, but if you get him down, you get him flat, he has a hard time getting back up. Even his third fight with Kamaru (Usman) was very, very close. So, if you go watch that fight then you watch Belal, the writing was on the wall, but Belal really pounded it in there of like a good game plan.”