In a shocking upset, Luke Rockhold beat Ronaldo “Jacaré” Souza by unanimous decision and won the Strikeforce middleweight belt.
Rockhold’s superior conditioning, good standup, and wrestling background were able to thwart Jacaré’s offensive.
Jacaré simply couldn’t keep the high school wrestler down and work his jiu-jitsu. As a former BJJ world champion, this was probably very frustrating for him.
Pure BJJ practitioners who transition into MMA often have problems dealing with wrestlers. Wrestlers spend a larger percentage of their training learning to stand up and avoid being taken down than BJJ practitioners do learning to take their opponents down and hold them down.
After Jacaré lost, many fine gentlemen on the internet commented on the weakness of jiu-jitsu, and proclaimed that wrestling was more important than the ground game or the standup in MMA.
I don’t think this is true. A pure wrestler will never become a champion. The days of one-dimensional fighters being successful are long past. A fighter also needs to have great standup or a great ground game.
Dominic Cruz, Frankie Edgar, GSP, Jon Jones and Cain Velasquez didn’t just become champions because they are some of the best wrestlers in their respective divisions. They are also some of the best strikers.
That being said, it should be noted that there are far fewer BJJ practitioners who develop elite striking than there are wrestlers who do so.
The percentage of MMA fighters with wrestling backgrounds who become elite strikers far exceeds the percentage of MMA fighters with BJJ backgrounds who become elite strikers. When a fighter with a wrestling base fights one with a BJJ base, the wrestler more often has the better standup.
One would think that BJJ fighters and wrestlers would have the approximately same level of technical striking, since neither discipline intuitively leads into striking.
And yet, the percentage of BJJ fighters who develop good striking is lower than that of wrestlers. There is a simple explanation for this: quite frankly, wrestlers are harder workers than BJJ fighters across the board. They are more willing to train extensively in an alternate style, and more willing to adjust their own style properly to MMA.
This is in part because high school and college wrestling is physically grueling and weeds out people unwilling to do hard work early. Only the mentally strong remain.
BJJ isn’t so physically grueling and it’s training is comparatively lax. For this reason, BJJ practitioners have a harder time adjusting to the intensive workouts and training sessions MMA requires of fighters.
This is not to say no BJJ fighter can work hard. BJ Penn, Demian Maia, Jose Aldo and the Nogueira brothers are all hard workers and have all found reasonable success. But most BJJ practitioners aren’t such exceptionally hard workers.
Wrestlers won’t continue to dominate the rankings because their style is better suited for MMA than any other style.
They will continue to dominate the rankings because they work the hardest. It’s that simple.
That said, a fighter of any base can become great. Jacaré’s loss is a reflection of his own shortcomings, not the shortcomings of jiu-jitsu. A fighter’s abilities and work ethic are more crucial to his success than the style he happened to be brought up in.
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