Conor McGregor’s comeback ended with a whimper. Four years after Dustin Poirier handed him back-to-back losses, McGregor lost the UFC 329 headliner to Max Holloway by technical knockout, done in by a knee injury just 69 seconds into the opening round. What followed was a wave of conspiracy talk questioning whether he’d been fully fit to begin with. This drew a response from someone with an unusually direct line into exactly that kind of accusation: Gina Carano.

“It’s rigged! It’s fake! The fighter threw the fight for money or fame. You know how much trouble you get in if anything is off or the fight is rigged in a professional fight, especially ones where huge money is involved?” Carano wrote on X. “The FBI is all over this sport presently, if you’ve been paying attention. If someone’s going to rig a fight, 2026 would be the absolute dumbest time to do that. It’s just REAL. And real outcomes aren’t always fun.”

“The stakes wouldn’t be so high and the sport so amazing if we all got the storybook ending we think we want.”

Carano accompanied the post with the famous “Man in the Arena” excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 “Citizenship in a Republic” speech. Her scathing critique likely stems from her own personal experience, one that in some ways mirrors the situation surrounding McGregor.

Seventeen years after her last fight against Cris Cyborg, Carano returned to the cage this past May against Ronda Rousey on the first MMA card promoted by Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions. Rousey, herself coming back after a decade away, needed just 17 seconds to submit Carano with an armbar. The lopsided result immediately drew its own rigged-fight rumors.

What most of those rumors missed is that Rousey wasn’t even fully healthy going in. She’d sprained her ankle roughly two and a half weeks before the fight, an injury MVP co-founder Nakisa Bidarian says he didn’t learn about until just days out. Carano had no way of knowing any of that walking in. It’s the closest thing to a real-world mirror of what people are now speculating happened with McGregor, an opponent’s hidden physical issue, and it produced the same kind of finish-too-fast, must-be-fake reaction Carano is now pushing back on.

Bidarian addressed the conspiracy talk directly at the time.

“The fact that people are speaking about it—’ Oh, that must’ve been fixed. ”How did that happen? ‘One, you definitely don’t know the history of Ronda Rousey. Two, if you’re going to fix something, you certainly wouldn’t do it to last 17 seconds. And three, it just speaks to the beauty of the sport and the unexpected.”

“It just speaks to a lack of understanding of the sport,” Bidarian added. “The entire UFC-Ronda Rousey train was built on quick finishes. She was the biggest pay-per-view star in the sport based on quick finishes.”

That same lack of understanding, in Carano’s view, is what’s driving the reaction to McGregor now. He’s addressed it in his own words too.

Conspiracy theories grow, but Conor McGregor and Dana White aren’t having it

McGregor addressed the speculation around his own loss directly on social media, denying he’d carried any injury into the fight at all.

“I was so sharp and so ready for this fight; I cannot believe what has happened. The talk of me being off while walking into the fight is nonsense. I was calm, ready, and confident. I am in shock about what has taken place. The devil is literally staring at me right in front of my face here. I am not engaging. I will be at church tomorrow,” McGregor wrote.

Dana White backed that account at the post-fight press conference, pointing to the McGregor-Holloway face-off footage, which had drawn more than 80 million views, and asking how a pre-existing injury could have gone unnoticed by every single person watching that closely.

“So if there was a pre-existing injury, somebody would have noticed it. I don’t think there was,” White said.

Still, the broader suspicion isn’t coming out of nowhere, even if it doesn’t apply cleanly to McGregor’s case. The UFC has dealt with real fight-fixing scrutiny before, which is part of why the rumors around McGregor found an audience so quickly.

Last November, the promotion worked directly with the FBI after betting integrity monitor IC360 flagged unusual action, including first-round prop bets, on underdog Yadier del Valle ahead of his fight with Isaac Dulgarian at UFC Vegas 110.

That followed an earlier case in 2022, when featherweight Darrick Minner lost in the first round to Shayilan Nuerdanbieke amid suspicious late betting. It later came out that Minner had fought with a pre-existing knee injury, and his coach James Krause was suspended by the Nevada Athletic Commission over a betting service tied to the fight.

A separate case dates back further still, to 2015, when South Korean fighter Tae Hyun Bang was sentenced to 10 months in prison for a scheme to throw a UFC bout in Seoul.

That distinction, real cases existing versus every controversial finish being one of them, is the same argument Carano is making about McGregor. Accidents and quick finishes are common enough in combat sports that jumping straight to “fixed” is usually a stretch, even with real fight-fixing cases on the UFC’s own record.

Holloway himself isn’t treating the finish as settled business. He’s already said he wants a trilogy fight with McGregor and is willing to wait until 2027 for it, but only once McGregor’s actual diagnosis is known. The shape of that third fight, and whether it happens at all, now depends entirely on the same MRI results the injury speculation has been circling since Saturday night.