Sean Brady would have loved the opportunity to fight in his home state.
UFC 330 takes place on Aug. 15 at Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia, and is headlined by a welterweight title fight between champion Islam Makhachev and Ian Machado Garry. In the co-main event, strawweight champion Mackenzie Dern makes her first title defense against Gillian Robertson.
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Brady (19-2 MMA, 9-2 UFC) returned to the win column when he dominated Joaquin Buckley at UFC 328 in May. While he would have made the exception for a relatively quick turnaround at UFC 330, he doubts a suitable opponent would have been available in time.
“I never got offered anything,” Brady told Home of Fight. “If you look at the division, I’m (No.) 5 on the Meta rankings and I’m 6 on the other ones. Me and (Gabriel) Bonfim are right next to each other, so I know there’s some talk of potentially me and him fighting at some point. But because he just fought Belal (Muhammad), it would have been even shorter notice for him to get on the Philly card. There really was no options and they didn’t offer me anything.
“I know a lot of the fans are disappointed, and I talked about it on my podcast because I get messages literally even right now, ‘Why are you not on the Philly card? Are you going to be on the Philly card?’ And at this point, it’s (12) days away. They’re not adding any fighters to it. I know my teammate Joe Pyfer was supposed to be on the card. Then Caio (Borralho) got hurt, so they got pulled off of that. We have Jeremiah (Wells) on it, and that’s literally it. It’s cool that you get two title fights, but the rest of the card is kind of underwhelming. … It’s just unfortunate that they didn’t get more local people on the card.”
Brady will return to action this month, but on the wrestling mats. He takes on Olympic gold medalist and six-time world champion Jordan Burroughs in the RAF 12 main event on Aug. 22 at Rocket Arena in Cleveland.
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Sean Brady takes issue with lack of Philadelphia fighters at UFC 330
