Twice before, in 2016 and 2017, the 28-year-old had to figure out what went wrong on fight night and how to get back on track, and after his submission defeat to Jose Calvo in 2017, he ran off four wins culminating in a first-round finish of Armando Villareal on last summer’s Dana White’s Contender Series that earned him a UFC contract.
“I’ve learned so much from the three losses that I’ve had,” Osbourne said. “It makes me a better fighter. When you win all the time, I’m not trying to brag or anything or say I win all the time, you lose that drive. If you go on a winning streak for three years and everything is just going your way, you get lax, and I think I definitely got a little lax. And when you lose, it gives you that drive. Somebody can beat me? All right. It gives you something to chase.”
Osbourne is more than ready to resume that chase, and once the call comes in from his team, he’ll have his gloves and mouthpiece packed up for wherever he’s needed.
“I fully trust the fight decisions they make for me,” said Osbourne of his coaches at Pura Vida MMA in Milwaukee. “They’ll call me when they have a fight for me and they’ve talked to my manager and they say this is what we’ve analyzed. They know how I am, I’ll take a fight right away, but they haven’t said anything yet.”
In the meantime, Osbourne is trying to keep things as normal as possible for the students he teaches, even though nothing is normal these days.