Sean O’Malley gives the relentless Conor McGregor Scouting Report

At one point, UFC bantamweight champion Sean O’Malley admired and looked up to Conor McGregor.

It seems he even modeled his flamboyant style after the two-division champion. Those days of admiration and warmth towards McGregor appear to be a thing of the past as O’Malley unleashed a scathing assessment of his former idol’s fighting skills in a post on X on Monday.

After a poke from McGregor, O’Malley laid it out in a short series of X posts aimed at the former.

The two men had traded insults, but in the most recent situation, McGregor appeared to mock O’Malley on social media.

In a now-deleted post, McGregor added a laughing emoji as he quoted-reposted a clip of O’Malley claiming to have received information about Ostarine contamination possibly coming from sweat transfer.

I got a screenshot of McGregor’s post before he took it down.

O’Malley has tested positive for a banned substance twice, most recently in 2019. He was suspended for the offense but has always maintained that he never knowingly took a performance enhancer.

The banned substance O’Malley tested positive for was Ostarine. This drug entered the consciousness of combat sports fans after it was found in Ryan Garcia’s A and B samples before and after his fight with Devin Haney in April.

McGregor has been an outspoken critic of PED-related fighters and once lumped O’Malley in that category. O’Malley responded candidly to this criticism from McGregor, but admitted it made him “sad.”

This time, he looked more prepared and armed with comebacks for the MMA icon.

All insults based on some level of truth run a little deeper, which makes some of the things O’Malley identified particularly noteworthy.

He recognizes that McGregor is on another level from an entertainment standpoint and acknowledges the flash of the Irishman’s left hand. However, O’Malley is targeting the cardio that has seemingly failed McGregor in some fights, such as the first fight with Nate Diaz, and the questionable jiu-jitsu that may have contributed to losses to Diaz and Khabib Nurmagomedov.

Accusations of drug use and mental weakness are deeply personal, but they’re the kind of mind games McGregor regularly plays with his targets, so it would be unfair to scream foul.

The fact that we’ll likely never see these two face off in an octagon almost makes this feud a temptation, but it’s sure to turn heads any time a pair of the sport’s biggest stars are at odds.

Per McGregor, the injured toe that knocked him out of UFC 302 has healed (though he deleted that post too), and there is hope that he will return to the Octagon before the end of the year. As for O’Malley, he is expected to headline Noche UFC in a title defense against Merab Dvalishvili in September.