Anthony Pettis confident he will finish dos Anjos in the first round: I'm due for a knockout

Not only has Anthony Pettis been forced to tolerate consistent trash-talk from Dagestan-native Khabib Nurmagomedov for the past few months, but also now finds himself deflecting similar jabs from the ordinarily reserved Rafael dos Anjos.

Dos Anjos, who is scheduled to challenge Pettis for the lightweight championship at UFC 185 in March, recently made the bold proclamation that since he knocked out Ben Henderson, he expected to do the same with Pettis.

Pettis, however, simply could not fathom the Brazilian's reasoning.

"Benson Henderson is not even close to being on my level in striking, and neither is Rafael dos Anjos," Pettis told MMAFighting.com. "His striking, to me, he's a decent striker, but when I look at him I'm not afraid of his striking. His jiu-jitsu as well. His wrestling is decent. I mean, I just feel like I'm a bad match-up for him. The things that he thinks he's good at is where I'm way better than him at."

Since his opponent took the liberty to offer a bold proclamation, Pettis took it one step further and predicted that the fight would not last more than a single round, and would feature his first knockout win in almost two years.

"I'm going to finish the fight," Pettis added. "I don't know exactly how. My last few fights were submissions so I'm due for a knockout. But if he thinks he's going to stand there and bang with me, then I think this fight will definitely end in a knockout, and I don't see it going out of the first round. I mean, even though Melendez got me into the second, I actually fought that fight a little safe. Even though it didn't go so long into the second round, I just fought it safe. I was inching along out there, but I think now I'm back at it. I don't think I need more than five minutes to take this guy out."

Transcription taken from MMAFighting.com.