Brendan Schaub had a decent argument buried somewhere in his latest YouTube rant. He just dug it up with a backhoe, ran over it twice, and then set it on fire on X the next morning.
Here’s the setup. During the UFC 333 broadcast this past Saturday, the promotion announced that Carlos Prates will fight Michael Morales for an interim welterweight title in the UFC 336 co-main event. Prates was supposed to get Islam Makhachev and the real belt. According to Bloody Elbow, Makhachev decided the 33-year-old striker hadn’t done enough to earn a title shot and said he’d rather watch Prates and Morales sort it out. A lot of fans read that as a duck. The champion is now expected to sit until after March, once Ramadan is over.
Schaub, 43, took that and went somewhere else entirely. On his YouTube channel he claimed the Prates fight was “pretty much cemented, signed, done deal” for Toronto on January 30, and that Makhachev pulled out over Ramadan. Then he went broad. “This is why you’ve got to be careful of crowning new champs when they’re from that origin,” he said, later adding, “this is why you can’t have champs of that religion, you can’t run a business off it.” He also threw in that “Dana bends the knee to Dagestani’s” and said the UFC should have stripped him.
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The backlash was quick, and by Thursday Schaub was posting a cleanup statement on X. “Religion isn’t the point,” he wrote, saying the comments were a bigger point taken out of context and that “you can’t build stars if they’re not active.” He finished by admitting his rant “was dumb cause Islam is already a superstar.”
That last part is the most accurate thing he said all week.
The numbers don’t cooperate
I’m a numbers guy, so let’s start with the stat that should have stopped this whole thing before the camera turned on. Bloody Elbow points out that since 2020, Makhachev has fought exactly as many times as Alexander Volkanovski. Volkanovski gets praised constantly as one of the most active champions in the sport. If Makhachev’s schedule is proof that a whole religion can’t carry a belt, then Volkanovski’s identical schedule has to be proof of something too, and nobody is making that argument about him because it would be silly.
One fighter’s calendar is a sample size of one. You wouldn’t bet a moneyline on one data point, and you shouldn’t build a theory about millions of people on one either. I’ve lost money on worse logic, but at least I only lost money.
The reason is in dispute anyway
The bigger problem is that Schaub’s whole case hangs on Ramadan being the reason Makhachev passed on Prates. The sources don’t agree on that. When Dana White was asked why Makhachev isn’t defending at UFC 336, White said Islam gave no reason, and he criticized the champ for potentially holding up the 170-pound division. Bloody Elbow’s reporting says Makhachev’s position was that Prates hadn’t earned it yet. Ramadan does explain why he’s out until after March. It doesn’t explain why he turned down a specific opponent, and that’s the part fans are actually mad about.
So Schaub took a contested reason, assumed the version that fit his point, and then stretched it over a whole faith. That’s a narrative-driven pick if I’ve ever seen one, and I hate those even when the stakes are a $20 parlay.
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The part he got right
Here’s where I’ll give him something. The activity complaint is legitimate. Makhachev is 35, and Bloody Elbow notes he often fights twice a year at most. White is clearly annoyed, and the UFC created an interim title specifically because the welterweight division can’t sit and wait. A champion who picks his challengers and then goes quiet for months is a fair target for criticism. Fans calling it a duck are allowed to do that. Schaub is allowed to say the UFC should have stripped him.
That’s a real take. It’s a take about a single fighter making a single choice, and you can argue it all day using White’s own words. Schaub had White in his corner on the business side and still decided to swing at religion instead. His X statement basically concedes the point he should have opened with, which is that inactivity is the issue and it could come from any number of places.
What bugs me most is the walk-back itself. Calling it “taken out of context” doesn’t hold up when the quote is “this is why you can’t have champs of that religion.” There’s no bigger context that makes that sentence mean something else. Saying the rant was dumb is closer to honest. He should have stopped there.
Meanwhile the actual fight business keeps moving. Prates and Morales will slug it out for the interim belt at UFC 336, and Makhachev won’t be back until sometime after March. If the interim champ looks great and Makhachev keeps stalling, Schaub’s activity argument gets stronger with zero help from him. That’s the version worth a video.
