"I love Fedor" - Daniel Cormier clarifies why he said Fedor Emelianenko would have been 'average' in the UFC

Daniel Cormier has offered some clarification as to what his recent comments regarding Fedor Emelianenko were trying to convey.

The former two-division UFC champion received considerable backlash on social media after speaking on his Debate DC show on the Vover app. Cormier insisted that Fedor Emelianenko would have only been amongst the top-five or top-seven fighters in the heavyweight division of the UFC, rather than competing at the top.

However, he has since released a video to his YouTube channel defending his comments. While he did state Fedor would not have been particularly successful in the UFC, Cormier reiterated that he was only referring to a specific period of time.

"Fedor Emelianenko. Guys, let's just put this out there. I absolutely love Fedor. Let's not make it anything that it isn't. So earlier in the week I had this conversation on my show, Debate DC... We had a conversation about whether Fedor could rule the UFC in the way that he did at some of the other, Pride and all the other organizations that he fought in prior. I said no. But I was very specific in the timeframe. I didn't say that 2005, four, three, six Fedor couldn't... I said in a window of nine to 12, I didn't think that he would be as good as he had shown to be prior."

Check out Daniel Cormier's full response video below:

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Daniel Cormier's initial comments about Fedor

The initial clip that had fans outraged was posted to Daniel Cormier's Twitter account, paired with the following caption:

"As the great Fedor gets to fight this weekend I was asked how I thought he would do during the 2009-2102 [2012] years. Here is my thought, he would have been top 5-7(average). Ok I may have misspoke on the Cheick Kongo thing."

In the video, Cormier can be heard stating that whilst he believes Fedor could have defeated Brock Lesnar, he would have fared poorly against the other top contenders in the UFC heavyweight division at the time.

'DC' suggested that 'The Last Emperor' would not have been able to overcome Junior dos Santos or Cain Velasquez. He also claimed the Russian would have struggled to overcome Chiek Kongo as well.