Colby Covington removed from American Top Team's official website
Earlier today multiple forums starting from Sherdog to r/MMA noticed that American Top Team doesn't have former interim-champion, Colby Covington, listed on their website roster. Many are speculating that this move comes after yet another barrage of trash talk that Colby Covington has unleashed on fellow teammates.
Last year it was Joanna Jedrzejczyk who went public and said that she didn't like the way, Colby Covington dealt with fellow teammates, as she said,
"You shouldn’t s**t in your gym. What (Covington) has done, it’s like pretty shady, you know? I really do not respect that. I really don’t like it because we are all teammates.”
In fact because of Colby Covington's attitude, ATT even incorporated a new rule that prohibited fighters from trashing fellow teammates. ATT owner, Dan Lambert, in an interview said,
"Unless you have a bout agreement to fight someone, in which case there obviously needs to be some promotion, there’s a gag order on talking about people at the gym. If that’s something a fighter chooses they need to do, then they have to go train somewhere else.”
This most probably was the rule that kicked in when Colby Covington decided to publically attack former-champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk again,
"There was never a problem. I never said anything about Joanna, I never looked at her wrong or anything. She tried to flirt with me, and I wasn’t giving her the time of day because let’s be honest, I have standards, and she just doesn’t fit those standards. I’m too busy to waste my time on some ugly woman from Poland or whatever."
Colby Covington had been warned beforehand
Colby Covington has justified his persona multiple times saying that it gets him attention but it looks like ATT is done tolerating him. In fact, in the same interveiw, Dan Lambert had even said he regretted not holding Colby Covington down earlier,
"I don’t know if it was this last round of talk where Colby came out and kind of violated a truce I had between him and Poirier, or some of the talk between him and Joanna (Jedrzejczyk). It may be just the big scheme of things, dealing with some of the other problems that affect our sport and everybody’s lives; I see how petty some of this stuff is, and why the f**k am I dealing with it and (have) allowed it to become an attraction? I should never have let it get to that point. It’s my job to stop s**t like that from happening and causing distractions in the gym. I think I made a mistake on that one, so live and learn.”