Welcome once again to a ridiculously late version of Post-fight Patterns, where whoever might be reading this has already forgotten about Demetrious Johnson, Jon Jones and Anthony Pettis in favour of discussing Balanced Breakfast Conor and Beachfront Brawler Rousey.
UFC 197? Remember that? Let’s go back and take a look.
Archetypes
One of the best things about watching MMA is the emergence of different styles and the seemingly-constant paradigm shifts. However, sometimes this can trick us a bit, via the assumption that those who have success are representative of new and potentially exciting trends. Conversely, though, it makes more sense that at this point we can increasingly recognize that there are a series of archetypes which are simply more effective than others. Some fighters are better at using the tools they choose to employ, and some are better athletes than others, but there are some approaches which are Good MMA, and some which are not.
Edson Barboza and Anthony Pettis were both high-octane strikers who racked up high-octane wins. If historically asked who had the better, more stable style, the answer would have been Anthony Pettis at almost every moment… until now. He was physically tougher than Barboza, and more well-rounded, with a dynamic submission game to back up his striking.
Increasingly, though, it becomes apparent that Good MMA is less about being skilled at lots of separate areas of MMA (although that helps), but around making sure the approach is connected through the separate areas and phases which the fighter needs to operate in; and that it’s built of high-percentage and multi-purpose tools.
The knock against Pettis has often been “wrestling defense”, and ever since he lost to Clay Guida it’s been something which dogged him. After he lost a turgid decision to Eddie Alvarez, he said that he’d never be able to train wrestling enough to be able to beat the fighters he was up against in that phase. His level of wrestling was never really the problem, though.
Against Alvarez, for example, it wasn’t stopping the takedowns, It was that he wasn’t doing anything to stop Alvarez from trying them. He had no clinch offense, no takedowns of his own, and he constantly backed into the fence and gave up foot position. Pettis would be forced into a situation when he was waiting to stop takedowns, and his volume was dropping, and (reductively) all Alvarez had to do was to spam TDs until they worked. The wrestling in the end wasn’t the problem, but more that the counter-wrestling was constructed as a singular disconnected wall, and the problem was everything which surrounded it.
Michael Johnson, as a counter-example, is a fraction of the grappler that Pettis is, yet he’s become a far more effective defensive wrestler by simply never letting opponents line up a shot, via tight microsteps on the outside and jamming the opponent with a jab or left hand as they follow. Like Barboza, this was a development which had its growing pains (a selection of grapplers who cracked his movement-based outer layer, then dominated him on the floor or tapped him out) but it’s unquestionably a more stable basic style. It is Good MMA.
Keeping at it
Edson Barboza was always a great kicker, and his weaknesses were in his hands: he was pressured and knocked out by Varner; he was lucky to escape with the wins against Pearson and Castillo, and only won his fight against Njokuani with a last-second wheel kick. The problems were almost always with his boxing, and it seemed that whenever he’d develop it he’d be forced to take a step back again. Against Cerrone he threw excited, whizzing combinations like a kid trying out a bike and zooming downhill with the brakes off, until crashing into a Cerrone jab. Michael Johnson pressured him relentlessly, as did Tony Ferguson. In every fight, crucially, though his footwork and head movement got that little bit tighter, his counters got a little more crisp.
The fear was that it wouldn’t matter, because he was losing, and losing relatively often. Every fighter has a massive reserve of confidence to draw upon, but Barboza is a physical freak; the sort of guy who struggles to find sparring partners who won’t get injured if they train with him. If you have these kind of ridiculous physical gifts you just do not expect to lose. It would be more than forgivable if he retreated from the area where he was struggling, and gave up on the whole “boxing” thing, and just started moving backwards faster and faster in fights to desperately get to the area where he could kick effectively, where he knew he was faster and more athletic than everyone else. Instead he doggedly kept working on his boxing, refusing to back away despite his nominally terrible chin and allergy to pressure.
History and the future
It looked as though both Pettis and Barboza came out ready to counter the other’s kicking offense, and so, in the same way that fights between wrestlers often do, the fight between two kickers became about hands.
Barboza ended up beating up Pettis’ legs towards the close, but the foundations for the win were in what are becoming some of the most important elements for good, high-level MMA as a whole: tight footwork, the jab, and the hook. Barboza has worked on his weakness so diligently that he won the biggest fight of his career by exploiting someone in very similar ways that he himself used to be exploited. That deserves deep praise, for both Barboza and his coaches.
For Pettis, it’s hard not to think of this as perhaps being part of a long history of dynamism slowly being dragged down by attritional fundamentals: a story which goes all the way back to when Duke Rufous’ brother Rick fought the Thai Changpuek Kiatsongrit in one of the most famous kickboxing bouts ever, which is brilliantly chronicled by Lawrence Kenshin. Like Lawrence, I stress that this isn’t a criticism of Rufous: just an illustration of the way that history always tries to repeat itself. It’s sneaky that way.
If that’s the history of a dynamic style, then what about the future? Yair Rodriguez landed a highlight reel KO worthy of Pettis or Barboza just before this fight, and he has a choice as to which path he can make: a dynamic Pettis, or the slower, harder slog of painstakingly built round-winning fundamentals taken by Edson Barboza.
Yair’s team at Jackson-Wink are cognizant of the potential risks of him becoming a bit too reliant on flashy low-percentage moves, but they’ve always been more of a “polish” than a “break down and rebuild” team- their strengths are in the intangibles, and in strategy and tactics. Their greatest product, then, is fittingly perhaps the best intangibles, strategy and tactics fighter the sport has ever seen.
Motivated Jones vs Sober Jones vs Weightlifter Jones vs…
With that being said, is Jon Jones’ style Good MMA? The answer is a cautious (and controversial?) “maybe.” His outside striking is predicated on the opponent coming towards him. He is not all that quick on his feet, and tends to hold his ground and peck at the opponent with kicks to the legs and thighs on the approach, and then locks up the clinch once they’re inside. A very notable point is that his strongest areas are generally only accessed when the opponent forces their own way past this outer layer, and that his own ability to actively close distance is limited.
The idea that Jones is only effective because of his reach is not only overplayed but pointless. However, he does have a style very clearly built around being the more effective range striker, despite his distance game being made of pieces which are… unorthodox. His approach is not just attuned to his frame relative to his opponents, but to the division in general- oblique kicks are good on slow fighters, less effective on the smaller and faster ones who populate the lighter weight classes. Similarly, his peppery distance style has normally been effective against a collection of opponents who are in various ways slow and linear. Cormier and Teixeira were able to work their ways past this layer without too many problems, but found that the inside was where the real problems came.
It may seem blasphemous to offer these criticisms of The Greatest Fighter In The World / Of All Time, but to ignore them would be weird- if you wanted to teach someone the best approach, you wouldn’t build their game around oblique kicks, elbows and the clinch. Jones’s real genius is not in his approach but instead, in his mind. The individual aspects of combat he uses aren’t high-percentage, but his ability to assemble or reassemble those pieces is unparalleled. He starts breaking opponents own early and figures them out over time, and is one of the most consistent winners of fourth and fifth rounds in the sport.
Aside from his ability to read the flow of the fight, his success has also come from his confidence and the ability to commit to changing that flow at the crucial instant. Maybe his finest moment was when he battled his way back into the fight against Gustafsson using spinning elbows and raw head kicks. Mike Bohn (and if you haven’t read his Rolling Stone piece then what are you doing here?) made the interesting point that there might be a downside to a sober Jones. Specifically, that the drugs and party lifestyle allowed Jones a sort of mental safety net; the ability to try crazy and unorthodox things with the reassuring knowledge that if he failed then he hadn’t been at 100% in the first place. If that’s true, and it does chip away at his confidence in some significant way, it raises interesting questions about the blurry lines between something like Jones’ addiction and Nick Diaz’s self-medication, for example. Jones himself talked about how he struggled to pull the trigger during the OSP fight.
It’s generally best not to rely on hypothetical external factors without much backing information during analysis, though- it’s good to keep it as a possibility, but these things can colour our limited preconceptions. For example, before the fight there was an expectation of some kind of mythical Motivated Powerlifting Clean Jones, and people likely would have attributed a good performance to that incarnation. Similarly, this performance can be attributed to Rusty Jones, or perhaps even Sober Jones.
In the end though, it was a very dominant performance, if not a great one, but it wasn’t atypical either- it resembled the Evans and Rampage wins, where Jones wore down dangerous punchers from range, albeit without the use of elbows on the shorter Evans, and without OSP tiring as badly as Rampage. More than a referendum on where he is mentally or the time off he’s taken, it’s a reminder that Jones’ style relies on smaller margins than people give it credit for.
He’ll likely still beat Cormier, of course- the much shorter man, Cormier will be forced into the clinch again, where Jones is borderline unbeatable. The more interesting questions are around a possible matchup with Rumble Johnson, where it seems increasingly probable that Jones will be forced to play a range game with a much more powerful and technically sound striker, with approximate reach parity, who is crucially capable of kicking with him. This, I think, may be the test of Jones’ career, where the key to victory more than ever may be around leveraging that brilliant mind and those intangible gifts against a fighter whose main weaknesses are in exactly those areas.
That’s likely some way in the future, however. Until then, he probably remains comfortably the greatest fighter in the world. He is not, however, the best.
The Mouse and the mirror
Demetrious Johnson used to struggle with wrestling, and Brad Pickett, Dominic Cruz and Ian McCall all picked up and dumped him repeatedly. It seemed that after the first McCall fight, that he decided: No, this will not do. I don’t want to be outwrestled anymore. So he stopped being outwrestled, and that was that.
A secondary flaw opened up in his close wins over John Dodson and Benavidez, where his stance-switching and over-commitment to in and out movement got him repeatedly hurt by the more powerful punchers. Again, this wouldn’t do, and so Johnson decided that he wouldn’t get hit very much anymore either, and didn’t.
This is the tenor of Demetrious Johnson’s championship run. Most fighters get better at the things they’re strongest at, and get better at hiding their flaws. The Mouse makes his flaws go away.
Benavidez was the other fighter who could have been champion, and hasn’t lost to anyone at this weight class, and often fights against either potential or past title challengers. This allows an approximate guess at what a potential Benavidez title reign might have looked like in a parallel Mouseless timeline: sometimes Joe B finishes his opponents, but most of the time he doesn’t. Fights are often closer than expected as opponents tune their approach to counter his, but he stays ahead of them by being stronger in his best areas. Essentially there’s a solid chance Benavidez would have been a dominant champion, and perhaps he’d even have the same number of title defenses as Johnson does (although Dodson would likely have been very hard for him), but there is simply no way that his reign would have engendered the air of almost hopeless dominance that DJ’s does.
At this point Johnson’s game is knitted together so smoothly and at such a microscopic level that its surface functions like a funhouse mirror, reflecting back distorted and inflated images of what everyone who fights him is bad at. Not even “bad”, perhaps, but just “not great”- Benavidez’s defensive flaws near the fence; Moraga’s first-layer takedown defense; Dodson’s second and third layer takedown defense; Horiguchi’s movement;. Within minutes holes were pinpointed and made to look like they weren’t just the small, inevitable flaws that come with every fighter’s game, but unsupportable structural defects.
Distorted reflections were again the order of the day on Saturday, when DJ wrecked Henry Cejudo. Being inside Johnson’s clinch must be Bizarro World for wrestlers; a nightmare in the space where they’ve trained their entire lives, where everything is subtly and terribly wrong. Instead of a stepwise advance or drive towards checkmate areas like the hips, the Plumm lives in the short and serpentine jerks which seem to go nowhere and have no purpose, apart from to destroy the posture for a fraction of a second. A slapping elbow comes over the top or a knee comes up from under. Rinse, repeat.
The way to beat Demetrious Johnson used to be wrestling, and he beat one of the greatest wrestlers in the world at something close to his own game. He continues to move away from his contemporaries like a space probe on its way out of the solar system, sending back data which seems increasingly meaningless in scale. Is he two years ahead of his current MMA world? Three years? At some point the widening gulf seems cruel. It becomes difficult to even describe the way he fights; the essence of Good MMA distilled down like eye-wateringly pure grain alcohol.