The line that should stick from Carlos Prates’ rant about Islam Makhachev is the one that undercuts it. Speaking with Brazilian journalist Laerte Viana, Prates called the welterweight champion a coward for declining to defend his title in January. Then he offered some advice: “It would honestly be less bad if you faked an injury and pretended you were hurt.”
Sit with that for a second. The man accusing someone else of lacking integrity recommended lying as the more honorable option. Prates thinks Makhachev’s sin was saying no out loud. That’s an odd hill for a guy who wants to be champion to plant a flag on, and it tells you what the whole outburst was for.
What actually happened
The facts are fairly simple. According to Bloody Elbow, Prates was expected to challenge Makhachev for the 170-pound title at UFC 336 in Toronto, a date that would have let the champion fit in one more fight before Ramadan started a few weeks later. Makhachev declined. Yahoo Sports, running a piece from Heavy, reported that the UFC tried to book the fight and that Makhachev turned it down. So the promotion pivoted to Prates against Michael Morales for an interim belt, which also leaves Ian Machado Garry, another top contender, without a seat at the table.
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Makhachev won the title in November 2025 and has defended it once. Bloody Elbow notes fans will now be waiting until at least April to see him. None of the reporting I’ve seen lays out his reasons for passing on January, and Prates certainly didn’t bother to supply any beyond calling him a coward.
Instead he supplied a secondhand account of the front office’s mood. Prates said the UFC was angry about the decision, and that Hunter Campbell had even said the date was reserved for Makhachev. Maybe so. But that’s a challenger telling a Brazilian outlet how his own employer feels about the champion he’s chasing, and it should be weighed accordingly. Nobody from the UFC is on record in these sources saying anything of the kind.
The best case for Prates
Here’s the strongest version of his argument, and it’s a fair one. A champion who has defended once in roughly a year, and who passed on a date the promotion says it held for him, is freezing a division, and the people stuck in the freezer are entitled to complain. That’s true. Garry is stranded. Prates had his title shot pulled out from under him right when, in his words, “the time finally came for me to achieve my dream of becoming champion.” Frustration is reasonable.
Frustration isn’t the same thing as cowardice, though, and the structure Prates is complaining about already solves his problem. As Heavy pointed out, an interim belt guarantees him the next undisputed fight, and the promotion expects Makhachev back next summer against the Prates vs. Morales winner. If Makhachev says no then, the Heavy piece says he gets stripped. The system works slowly, but it’s moving. Prates gets a belt fight in Toronto and a guaranteed shot behind it. The only thing he lost in January was the chance to make the champion look scared.
So he made the champion look scared anyway, verbally, from a studio.
Clout has a price, and Morales pays it
This is the part of fight promotion I find tiresome. A contender who hasn’t yet held a UFC belt decides the quickest route to relevance runs through the reputation of the man who has one. Makhachev earned the belt by winning it in a cage in November 2025. Prates earned a phone interview. One of those is a body of work, and the other is a clip that got passed around X by Championship Rounds and posted on r/MMA within hours.
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It worked, in the narrow sense. The quotes traveled. “He chickened out” is now a headline on Bloody Elbow and Yahoo. But a coward is somebody who avoids danger, and the reporting describes a champion who declined one date, not one opponent, with the promotion already penciling the next defense. Calling that cowardice is lazy. Prates also said he plans to beat Makhachev “twice as badly as I was going to before, just so he learns his lesson and stops being such a coward,” which is the kind of line that plays great until you have to back it up against the guy holding the belt.
There’s also a basic contradiction in the rant. Prates wants Makhachev to take the job seriously. “Your contract is for this. This is your job,” he said. Fine. Then he told him to fake an injury, which is the opposite of taking the job seriously. You can’t scold a champion for unprofessionalism and recommend a fake medical excuse in the same breath. The insult and the advice cancel each other out, and what’s left is a contender who was angry and wanted a microphone.
The honest thing to say about Prates is that he has a real fight in front of him and a real opponent who did nothing to him. He seems to know it. “Morales is going to be the one who pays the price now,” he said. That’s the most sensible sentence in the whole interview, and it has nothing to do with Makhachev.
He should spend the next stretch on it. UFC 336 in Toronto is where Prates gets to turn talk into a belt, and Morales won’t care what anybody said about the champion. If Prates wins, he gets Makhachev next summer with an interim title as leverage, and he can decide then whether he wants to call the man a coward to his face. My guess is the tone changes once they’re standing across from each other at the press conference.
