Sean Strickland posted twice on X on Friday afternoon, 23 minutes apart, and the two posts argue with each other.
The first went up at 17:50 GMT and put the blame on the audience: “You all cyber bullied Tim Kennedy into getting shot,” trailed by a row of periods. The second landed at 18:13 GMT. In it, Strickland pictured Kennedy lying there after being shot and offered two thoughts that might be running through his head. In the first, Kennedy is fired up: “fuck yeah call me a liar, I’m out here putting in work, just wait for this new book.” In the second, he’s full of regret: “fuck I let you guys bully me into this stupid shit, the book im gonna write isnt worth this shit.”
Strickland’s posts don’t say where Kennedy was, who fired, or how badly he’s hurt, and I’m not going to fill in blanks Strickland left empty. What I can do is break down what he actually threw. These two posts work like a feint and a cross, and the cross is the punch that matters.
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The Feint
Read alone, the first tweet sounds almost protective. Strickland points at the crowd and says, in effect, you did this. If you’ve spent any time around fighters, the general idea isn’t absurd. The comment section has real pull on people whose careers depend on attention, and plenty of athletes have made worse decisions with a phone in one hand.
But look at what the line does to Kennedy. It turns him into a man who can be steered by strangers typing at him. That’s a strange way to defend somebody. If the fans “cyber bullied” him into danger, then Kennedy’s choices weren’t really his, and Strickland gets to sound like the one guy in the room standing up for him while quietly shrinking him.
That’s the feint. It draws your eyes to the fans and gets your hands moving the wrong way.
The Cross
The second post is where Strickland’s actual point lives, and it’s a lot less sympathetic. He frames it as an open question, a coin flip between two versions of Kennedy. Check the structure, though. Both versions end at the book. In one, Kennedy is happy to take the risk because it proves the doubters wrong and gives him material. In the other, Kennedy regrets letting people push him, and the book is the thing he decides wasn’t worth it.
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There’s no third option on Strickland’s card. No version where Kennedy had his own reasons and the book is incidental. No version where the online noise had nothing to do with it. Strickland built a two-choice bracket, and every path runs through vanity or weakness. That’s a loaded question dressed up as curiosity.
It’s also a classic move from someone who wants to land a shot without owning it. He doesn’t say Kennedy did this for a book. He just wonders aloud whether Kennedy is lying there thinking about one. The phrase “call me a liar” in his imagined monologue does a lot of work too, because it lets Strickland bring up the idea that people have called Kennedy a liar without stating it as his own accusation.
If I’m scoring the exchange like a round, the clean strike didn’t go to the fans. It went to Kennedy. The cyberbullying line is the jab Strickland wants credit for. The book line is the one he actually threw with his hips.
Why the Framing Falls Apart
My issue here has nothing to do with Strickland being crude. That’s his voice, and nobody follows him on X for diplomacy. My issue is that his two posts can’t both be true in the way he wants. You can’t argue that fans bullied a man into danger and then, inside half an hour, suggest he went looking for danger to sell pages. One of those makes Kennedy a victim of the crowd. The other makes him a guy chasing a payday. Strickland wants the moral high ground of the first and the punchline of the second, and you don’t get to score with both.
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It’s also the kind of take that’s easy to post and hard to back up. Strickland offers no detail about what happened, no source for the book claim beyond his own speculation, and no evidence that any online pressure influenced what Kennedy did. He’s handing out a 10-8 based on a round he didn’t watch.
He’s got real things to talk about, too. Championship Rounds, citing Mike Bohn, reported Tuesday that Strickland vs. Nassourdine Imavov is being targeted for February in Florida and is “close to being signed.” Imavov is the man who knocked out Israel Adesanya in Saudi Arabia, and Strickland is the man who took the middleweight belt from Adesanya before losing it to Dricus du Plessis at UFC 297 in Toronto in 2024. That’s a fight worth an hour of his posting.
I’d much rather hear Strickland explain how he plans to handle Imavov in February than watch him run a two-option poll on what a man he says got shot is thinking.
