Askren criticizes O'Malley: 'Do you expect not to get hurt?'

Ben Askren believes Sean O'Malley showed a sign of weakness in his first career loss to Marlon Vera at UFC 252 last weekend.

O'Malley, a rising bantamweight star, injured his leg early in the co-main event and struggled to stay upright. "Sugar" fell to the mat late in the round and Vera pounded him out for a TKO win.

"I thought (the stoppage) was a little bit quick, but I think it was the right one seeing as ... O'Malley didn't really protest it whatsoever," Askren, a former UFC welterweight, said during an appearance on ESPN's "DC & Helwani" on Monday. "He wanted just to be out of there for whatever reason."

Askren said he understands that O'Malley was in pain, but the 36-year-old thinks fighters should assume they'll sometimes be in that position.

"It's a fistfight!" Askren said. "Deal with that shit! ... Do you expect not to get hurt? ... Yes, he was in pain, obviously. Listen, if you don't have the expectation that you're gonna be in pain when you get in a fistfight, you've got some bad expectations."

O'Malley was taken out of the Octagon in Las Vegas on a stretcher, and Askren criticized the budding prospect for allowing the on-site medical team to do so.

"If they tried carting me out with an ankle injury, I would've fought someone over that," Askren said. "You're not putting my ass on a stretcher because I got an ankle injury. I got one other good leg and I'm gonna hop all the way to the back, leave me the F alone. I think (O'Malley) needs to grow up."

Askren added, "It's part of growing up. In life, you have failures, you have struggles. You're going to learn from them. Obviously, he hasn't lost a fight to this point, so he probably hasn't experienced those really hard things."