Floyd Mayweather says he didn’t knock Conor McGregor out due to potential ‘brain damage’

While UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor did much better than expected against Floyd Mayweather Jr. inside of the boxing ring this past August, the brash Irishman ultimately lost the combat superfight via TKO. McGregor sustained copious amounts of damage along the ropes before the referee jumped in for the 10th-round stoppage.

Now that the dust has settled and the “Money Fight” can be viewed from an analytic aspect, Mayweather is giving insight into why he didn’t truly try to put McGregor out and inflict more damage than what was needed to win.

“He has a career. You know, he still has a career. He’s still young,” said Mayweather during a recent interview on the Hollywood Unlocked podcast.

McGregor, 29, is very young compared to Mayweather, 40, but has been in the hurt business for quite some time. Unlike boxing, McGrgeor’s mixed martial arts (MMA) playground offers countless opportunities to absorb incredible damage, whether it be from elbows to the skull, kicks to the head, or strangulation.

Still, despite the sport that McGregor comes from, Mayweather insists that he could have done even more harm to “Notorious” if he would have tried to knock him out.

“Very, very damaging,” insisted Mayweather. “We have to think about these fighters.

“Even, like, my uncle Roger. Right now, I just got a call, just before I came here, he keep walking off, wandering off. No one can find him. He end up in a hospital. So, brain damage – it happens. It happens.”

This isn’t the first time the brain damage card has been pulled from the deck. Just one week removed from McGregor’s loss to “Money” a former ringside physician proclaimed that the UFC champion had suffered a “minor traumatic brain injury” and that allowing him to continue in the fight would have been “grossly negligent.”

While nothing of the sort has been proven it’s interesting to see Mayweather take this kind of stance nearly one month later. It is possible that Mayweather simply didn’t pack enough punch to topple the thick-headed Irishman to the canvas. However, it is also possible that McGregor was saved by the referee before “Money” moved in for the final kill.

So what say you, Maniacs? Is Mayweather covering his tracks for not flattening McGregor or was he really concerned about damaging a “young” fighter’s career?