Straight from the horse's mouth:
Though everyone here is saying how skinny I looked and this and that, I was 2 pounds lighter than when I fought Okami. The difference is that I bulked up after the Okami fight and then over cut myself the 2 months leading to this fight. Next time I will come in bigger and cut more at weighins.
Burkman is strong and I wanted to prove that I could resist his takedowns and strength. I wanted to stuff his takedowns while gassing him then pick him apart on the feet. By the time the 3rd round came I let it get so close that just one takedown could have seen me going home with a loss and so I was more tentitive than I should have been. I tried to look for the one punch knockout over using my usual combinations and flurries and deeply regret it now.
Though I looked frail as some put it, I felt really strong at 170. My mistakes were mental. Believe it or not this whole experience made me a lot more confident about 170, my strength at 170, and dealing with what I had to go through leading up to this fight. You will see a much more confident me in my next fight and I hope to get back on track and put on the exciting fights I started my career with.
He's right about the takedown in the third round. Swick's uncharacteristic tentativeness made the possibility of Burkman taking him down unthinkable, so he was defensive virtually the entire round.
Perhaps it's just me, but I get the sense that the welterweight division is a "bully" division, where physical imposition and wrestling skills have a wider prevalence than in the middleweight division (generally speaking). If Swick believes he's strong enough, I can't tell him otherwise. However, I hope he's prepared for that smash-mouth style of fighting. It's not like he got a lot of that at middleweight.