Michael Steele says he could take Reince Priebus in a steel cage match.

"Oh, no question, I'd clean his clock," Steele told radio host Andrea Tantaros, who asked him about that very proposition, The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard reported today.

This week Steele has been dissing his successor as Republican Party chairman, Reince Priebus, as the Republican National Committee rolls out its party reboot and modernization plan.

And now he's called Priebus a "numbnuts"-we think.

Priebus in January announced that the RNC would compete in every state, part of the GOP reboot he just debuted.

Here's what Steele told Tarantos:

The national party is too big for its own britches now. It's centered the universe around itself out of D.C. When I was chairman, we put the emphasis and the interest back in the state parties. You have 50 individual state parties that reflect a cross section of this country, so you can't do a one size fits all, you have to do a 50-state strategy. So I was laughing at some of these numbnuts after the election talking about, 'Oh, well, we need to do a 50-state strategy.' Dude, where were you for 2009 and 2010? That's exactly what we did.

Sounds like a reference to Priebus.

Listen to Steele's comments here.