American Top Team head coach Mike Brown could only laugh when asked which of his fighters stresses him out the most while cornering them.
Brown will be in Dustin Poirier’s corner when he challenges Islam Makhachev (25-1 MMA, 14-1 UFC) for the lightweight title in Saturday’s UFC 302 (pay-per-view/ESPN2/ESPN+) main event at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.
Brown picked Poirier (30-8 MMA, 22-7 UFC) as the most stressful fighter to corner, pointing to his continuous guillotine choke attempts in his past win against Benoit Saint Denis – even though he kept advising him not to. Poirier has never won a fight by guillotine choke.
“He’s No. 1 by far,” Brown told CBS Sports. “By a long shot. I also care about it, so the more you care, the more you’re going to be stressed. He can make it harder on himself sometimes, and he’s his own guy. At the end of the day, he does what he wants to do. When he has something in his head, he’s going to do it. Like the guillotine is a good example. If he wants to jump the guillotine, he’s jumping the guillotine.”
Poirier eventually abandoned the guillotine and wound up knocking out Saint Denis. Poirier’s insistence of jumping the guillotine has become a running joke, with “The Diamond” not ruling out the possibility of trying it against Makhachev, too.
“He’s great at what he does, and he does have a good guillotine,” Brown said. “And he was damn close in that fight. They were close, but you also could’ve knocked him out. Every time you hit him, you were hurting him.
“At least when you’re hitting him, you’re not getting caught underneath. Every time you jump, you’re underneath and you’re putting yourself in a bad position. So it’s just a percentage game. Yeah, you can finish him, but we want to play the percentages.”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 302.
