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Let's stop with the Mayweather-McGregor talk

The idea of a potential bout – a boxing match – between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor is sheer lunacy. It’s almost certainly not going to happen and yet Mayweather is leading many around like sheep.

It’s been one of the most prominent topics in the fight game since a tabloid “broke” the news a few weeks ago that a bout between the superstars was done.

Nothing, of course, is further from the truth, but that hasn’t stopped people from talking about it and acting like it's going to happen.

Mayweather is simply looking for the easiest possible fight to make the most possible money. This is not meant to dog McGregor, the UFC featherweight champion and one of the finest mixed martial arts fighters in the world.

It’s reality, though. McGregor is not a boxer. Boxing and MMA are like cousins, but they are not the same sports by any stretch. An elite boxer will destroy an elite MMA fighter in a boxing match. And an elite MMA fighter would destroy a boxer in an MMA fight.

So when Mayweather talks about a $100 million payday to fight McGregor, what he’s really saying is that he doesn’t want anyone remotely in his class to fight him, but he wants to paid like he’s facing his greatest challenge.

UFC featherweight champ Conor McGregor. (Photo by Brandon Magnus/Getty Images)
UFC featherweight champ Conor McGregor. (Photo by Brandon Magnus/Getty Images)

Mayweather routinely dismisses a potential fight between himself and Gennady Golovkin, the IBF/WBA/WBC middleweight champion, saying Golovkin is too big. OK, fair enough.

But then he turns around in the same breath and he wants to fight a guy who hasn’t had a single professional boxing match? Any athletic commission worth its salt would not approve McGregor as an opponent for Mayweather in a boxing match, but sadly, the state of regulation in the fight game is such that it would, in fact, be approved somewhere.

Essentially, what fans who believe this idiocy should consider is if they’d want to see a boxing match between a guy who won an Olympic bronze medal and then went 49-0 as a pro going up against a 0-0 boxer.

If you thought the Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight was bad – and it was horrid – Mayweather-McGregor would be far worse.

I asked Bob Bennett, the executive director of the Nevada Athletic Commission, whether he’d approve a boxing match between Mayweather and McGregor. He declined to answer what he called a hypothetical, but his answer is telling nonetheless.

“The best I can tell you is that our No. 1 priority is the safety of the fighters,” Bennett said. “Whenever a matchmaker submits a bout to me, I look to see if it is approvable. There are a litany of databases I’ll look at, as well as YouTube, to evaluate how the people involved fight. There is a process I go through and if a fight is approvable, I’ll give it the green light.

“But if there are red flags or concerns I see, I will say no.”

UFC president Dana White, who is in Mexico on a short vacation after meeting with McGregor and Nate Diaz last week, said if there is to be a Mayweather-McGregor bout, Mayweather’s team would have to reach out to him.

“I haven’t talked to Floyd at all [about this],” White said, adding a quick no when asked if he’d spoken to Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe, Mayweather advisor Al Haymon or anyone else connected with the boxer about a potential bout with Mayweather. “If there is going to be a fight between Floyd and Conor, at some point, they need to talk to me.

“But here’s the thing: Floyd and [Manny] Pacquiao are in the same sport, and look how long it took for them to fight each other. It took six years for them to fight, and they didn’t have to negotiate the rules or anything else. If Floyd calls me, we’ll start with knees, kicks and elbows and go from there.”

Floyd Mayweather poses at a weigh-in. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Floyd Mayweather poses at a weigh-in. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

White told Yahoo Sports that he plans to begin working on McGregor’s next bout when he returns to Las Vegas on Tuesday. It’s likely he’ll fight in August, White said. Whether it is against Nate Diaz remains in the air. White said his meeting with Diaz in Stockton, Calif., last week didn’t go well.

Boxing fans would love to see Mayweather-Golovkin. Golovkin is a small middleweight who has weighed under 160 pounds in 29 of his 35 pro bouts, including his last 10 and 13 of his last 14.

Would Mayweather, who began his career at 130 pounds and who won a world title at 154 pounds, be giving up a little size against Golovkin? Of course.

But a Mayweather-Golovkin fight would be vastly more fair than any kind of fight between Mayweather and McGregor. If Mayweather would ever agree to fight McGregor in MMA rules, which he absolutely would never do, the fight wouldn’t last 30 seconds.

McGregor might not last a full round in a boxing match with Mayweather.

It is absolute, total nonsense.

Forget about it.

Please.