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Bellator NYC: Fedor Emelianenko vs. Matt Mitrione Toe to Toe Preview – A Complete Breakdown
Phil and David break down everything you need to know about the Bellator NYC co-main starring Fedor Emelianenko, and everything you don’t about Russian mafia.
Fedor, father of memes of Pride, returns to the cage this February 18, 2017 at the SAP Center in San Jose, California.
(Editor’s Note: Take 2! Phil and David originally wrote this preview for Bellator 172 in February, but since it was cancelled on fight day, we’re running it again on June 23rd, 2017 but with updated Bellator NYC odds.)
Single sentence summary:
Phil: The Last Emperor vs Meathead is not as much of a demotion in terms of quality opponents as it sounds… but it’s not that far off either.
David: It’s the mythical creature fight MMA fans longed for in demythologized format when Fedor was a cyborg meme, and Matt Mitrione had yet to embody the features of Manbearpig.
Phil: It’s hard to know what kind of legacy Fedor has among the casuals these days. We’ve had a couple of significant “waves” of fans making their way into the sport since his heyday- the Brock wave, which saw him at the tail end of his prime, and the McGregor and Rousey wave, for whom he’s only an abstraction. Tito and others have proven that there’s significant nostalgia dollar out there for the stars of yesteryear, but I’d be interested to see how the younger folk perceive him: Can-crusher? GOAT? Cautionary tale? I mean, he’s still the greatest heavyweight of all time, and it’s not particularly close, but I’m curious to see if the new fans see him that way.
David: I consider Fedor part of the Pre-Cambrian wave. Before Young Metro, crying Jordan, and vine clips that were enough to get people starring roles in Hunger Games-style mockbusters, there was Fedor; the mixed martial arts master of mimetic magnitude. Fedor ruled a world built on the bandwidth of the underground forums, and Sherdog.net. Unlike today, Fedor wasn’t chased by an assortment of celebrities, hipsters, and bloggers. This was the wild west, and Fedor was the internet’s John Wesley Hardin (John Nash can correct me on the proper western analogy), canonized by gym rats, pre-Zoe Quinn gamers, and the debauchees of Allison Stokke. Fedor isn’t just a unique icon in fight sports. He’s a cultural punctuation of a pre-reddit ecosphere, dual wielding ice cream cones like Call of Duty pistols. exacting violence in the ring like a teddy bear-faced Megalodon.
Phil: Matt Mitrione always seemed like he was just on the verge of breaking out, but in the end he ended up being a rebuttal to a narrative which the UFC seemed to pin a lot of its heavyweight hopes on – one where if you get decent athletes into the division, then they’ll organically become high-level fighters. As it turned out with respect to Messrs Struve, Browne etc. the answer to this hypothetical is: nah. Sometimes those guys just don’t become elite fighters, even in a division as weak as heavyweight. This isn’t to say that Meathead is a bad fighter, nor an uncompelling one. Arguably he’s one of the more egregious examples of TUF’s use of selective editing in order to make up “interesting” narratives. In this case, the narrative that he was an idiot.
David: Mitrione projected to be something more than heavyweight meat because he was, above all things, an athlete. Anywhere else, this would be faint praise, but in the realm of heavyweight, it can take you places. Sure enough, Mitrione rose fast, winning all five of his first career bouts (in the UFC no less), stumbled, rose again, and then stumbled one last time when Travis Browne scooped his eyeballs out with a spoon hiding underneath his four ounce baby gloves. Mitrione is still a UFC-quality fighter, but his candidness on fighter pay was probably too much for Dana to handle. So now he’s in Bellator, doing well for himself, it seems.
What are the stakes?
Phil: Inside the cage, this is a journeyman vs fading legend. Outside, it’s more fun. For Dana, Fedor has always been the one that got away (see Karim’s excellent piece), and he’s never been a man to let a grudge go. Remember when Fedor first got tapped out by Werdum, Dana just tweeted a single smiley? Classy. Anyway, Bellator has no chance of competing directly with the UFC, but a Fedor win under Coker will likely irritate White to an inordinate extent, and that’s the next best thing?
David: Sometimes the stakes are little too high when it comes to Fedor’s general quality of life. I don’t know that Dana is all that interested in finally catching his white whale. To quote Vince Vaughn, he has what I believe could accurately be called “blue balls of the heart” at this point. Not only has he been spurned over a garish meal on a small island like Tony Montana meeting high-class drug partners, but Fedor is not what he used to be. Then again, maybe that’s what Dana needs; closure. Like that free agent who is past his prime, but who you know fans will recognize as a nice final gesture. Narcissists require the last word, be it in conversation or history, so who really knows.
Where do they want it?
Phil: It’s difficult to know where Fedor wants the fight these days. In looking back, there’s a tendency to combine together the best of multiple eras to make some kind of superfighter, but Fedor definitely had different key competencies at different points. When he first came on the scene he was largely a grappler and top position ground and pounder; he evolved into something of a pressure fighter around the Cro Cop fight (probably his peak), and then he became something of a winging brawler as he was arguably seduced into believing too much in his power by the Arlovski KO. Thus, even in the establishment of Fedor as a faded fighter, we need to be sure what version we’re talking about rather than just turning down all of the dials from their respective peaks.
The one thing we can draw from his recent fights is that Fedor is definitely closer to his puncher incarnation than his grappler one. He was able to take down and destroy Jaideep Singh, but… c’mon. In the Maldonado fight, Fedor spent the entire time on the feet. Mitrione is someone that Fedor absolutely should take down, but the question is whether that’s something that he tries to do.
David: Fedor’s status grew in part, because he was a malleable fighter when it came to tactics. Grappling wise, he was offensively gifted. On the feet, his raw speed and ridgehand combination punching demanded respect even from K-1 level strikers like Mirko Filipović, and his ground and pound was revered as the most violent of its kind. I never really thought of Fedor as an intelligent fighter, per se. After all, large portions of his Pride career were spent wasting the durability of his fists on knocking down uncoordinated kaijus. But, as I said, tactics enhanced what were already elite talents. His third bout with Big Nog was a perfect example. Instead of leaning into the success of the ground and pound from their first bout, he brewed a stew of pressure combinations and takedowns that all but befuddled Nog when he refused to play in Nog’s guard (a tactic Nog explicitly complained about in his post-fight interview).
However, the residue of his late stage tactics as earthy brawler, molded by one too many wasted fights with Japanese wrestlers I’m sure, has stuck with him the most. Which is fine. I agree about his punches in the Maldonado fight. He has lost very little of his raw speed, and the fight itself is something of a miracle in durability. Fedor was OUT, and yet found ways to pressure Fabio in the late stages of that bout. What that says about how he’ll do against Mitrione is another story.
Phil: Mitrione is a good striker. Not a great one, but tough, mobile and well-trained in the dutch kickboxing style. Like other Hooft fighters he’s particularly good at softening up from the outside with leg kicks and then slicing down the outside angle with the left straight or the right hook. This is about as far as his game goes- he has decent first-layer takedown defense, primarily enabled by solid footwork, and can work knees and short shots in the clinch, but is a dismal grappler if someone manages to get past that first layer.
He is (or was) an excellent athlete, so everything is loaded with power and speed. If anyone who’s reading this is thinking “this guy sounds like a technically inferior heavyweight version of Michael Johnson“, you’re basically there.
David: Mitrione never really developed great mechanics, so much as great rhythm. Well, great rhythm in proportion to an ex-football player who made MMA a second career in his mid-thirties. As in, he strikes with a quality flow that’s undercut by not knowing how to make the best use of his angles and footwork. He’s similar to athletes with late growth spurts, who tend to the right things in uncoordinated ways.
I’m not sure his fight with Oli Thompson was a step forward. He came in too aggressively for first strikes, and then too passive backing up, only opening up when Thompson hit a cardio wall and freezed up. Still, his sheer speed, especially when slicing that leg kick down the middle, should allow him to remain successful, whether against Fedor or in the distant future.
Insight from past fights?
Phil: The Maldonado fight is a strange one for me. Everyone talks about how deteriorated Fedor is, but I honestly… don’t really see it all that much? I know this is sort of heresy, but Fedor still looked quick on his feet, and his punches looked sharp. In particular, he had a murderous jab which wasn’t in play for much of his late career. I have a sneaking suspicion that the real problem is that he just wasn’t used to fighting someone who could fight back. Since he achieved deity status in his home country, I’m not convinced that anyone who spars with him ever actually tries to hurt him, a notable problem when combined with a long lay-off. So you get this weird collection of skill, still-decent athleticism and toughness wrapped around a central core which is shocked when his opponents don’t immediately turn into heavy bags.
David: I watch Mitrione’s recent fights, and again going back to his fight with Thompson, and I go one of two ways. Either Fedor takes what Mitrione gives him; space, opportunities on the counter, and limited defense. Or Fedor attempts slugging with Mitrione and gets iced like Fedor officially did against Maldonado. A slugfest both benefits both men, and destroys them.
X-Factors?
Phil: The cage! Ring Fedor, etc.
David: Oh man. I remember getting sucked into these stupid internet debates. Ultimately they should be likened to clay versus grass like in tennis. Damnit, you pulled me back into this!
Prognostication:
Phil: Fedor should absolutely win this. However, he had trouble closing down and attacking someone as footslow as Fabio Maldonado without getting badly hurt, and started exceptionally slowly. For all his many flaws, Mitrione does not start slowly. Matt Mitrione by TKO, round 1.
David: I feel this is tougher than it should be. Mitrione may not start slow, but he’s still defensively porous. Fedor still has some of his trademark speed and Goodridge flow. Maldonado may be a decent striker, but he’s not a great fighter, and Fedor was unofficially beaten by him. It’s hard to imagine Fedor surviving Mitrione’s counter right hook as he backs him up with wide angle combinations. Matt Mitrione by TKO, round 2.
Phil and David break down everything you need to know about the Bellator NYC co-main starring Fedor Emelianenko, and everything you don’t about Russian mafia.
Fedor, father of memes of Pride, returns to the cage this February 18, 2017 at the SAP Center in San Jose, California.
(Editor’s Note: Take 2! Phil and David originally wrote this preview for Bellator 172 in February, but since it was cancelled on fight day, we’re running it again on June 23rd, 2017 but with updated Bellator NYC odds.)
Single sentence summary:
Phil: The Last Emperor vs Meathead is not as much of a demotion in terms of quality opponents as it sounds… but it’s not that far off either.
David: It’s the mythical creature fight MMA fans longed for in demythologized format when Fedor was a cyborg meme, and Matt Mitrione had yet to embody the features of Manbearpig.
Phil: It’s hard to know what kind of legacy Fedor has among the casuals these days. We’ve had a couple of significant “waves” of fans making their way into the sport since his heyday- the Brock wave, which saw him at the tail end of his prime, and the McGregor and Rousey wave, for whom he’s only an abstraction. Tito and others have proven that there’s significant nostalgia dollar out there for the stars of yesteryear, but I’d be interested to see how the younger folk perceive him: Can-crusher? GOAT? Cautionary tale? I mean, he’s still the greatest heavyweight of all time, and it’s not particularly close, but I’m curious to see if the new fans see him that way.
David: I consider Fedor part of the Pre-Cambrian wave. Before Young Metro, crying Jordan, and vine clips that were enough to get people starring roles in Hunger Games-style mockbusters, there was Fedor; the mixed martial arts master of mimetic magnitude. Fedor ruled a world built on the bandwidth of the underground forums, and Sherdog.net. Unlike today, Fedor wasn’t chased by an assortment of celebrities, hipsters, and bloggers. This was the wild west, and Fedor was the internet’s John Wesley Hardin (John Nash can correct me on the proper western analogy), canonized by gym rats, pre-Zoe Quinn gamers, and the debauchees of Allison Stokke. Fedor isn’t just a unique icon in fight sports. He’s a cultural punctuation of a pre-reddit ecosphere, dual wielding ice cream cones like Call of Duty pistols. exacting violence in the ring like a teddy bear-faced Megalodon.
Phil: Matt Mitrione always seemed like he was just on the verge of breaking out, but in the end he ended up being a rebuttal to a narrative which the UFC seemed to pin a lot of its heavyweight hopes on – one where if you get decent athletes into the division, then they’ll organically become high-level fighters. As it turned out with respect to Messrs Struve, Browne etc. the answer to this hypothetical is: nah. Sometimes those guys just don’t become elite fighters, even in a division as weak as heavyweight. This isn’t to say that Meathead is a bad fighter, nor an uncompelling one. Arguably he’s one of the more egregious examples of TUF’s use of selective editing in order to make up “interesting” narratives. In this case, the narrative that he was an idiot.
David: Mitrione projected to be something more than heavyweight meat because he was, above all things, an athlete. Anywhere else, this would be faint praise, but in the realm of heavyweight, it can take you places. Sure enough, Mitrione rose fast, winning all five of his first career bouts (in the UFC no less), stumbled, rose again, and then stumbled one last time when Travis Browne scooped his eyeballs out with a spoon hiding underneath his four ounce baby gloves. Mitrione is still a UFC-quality fighter, but his candidness on fighter pay was probably too much for Dana to handle. So now he’s in Bellator, doing well for himself, it seems.
What are the stakes?
Phil: Inside the cage, this is a journeyman vs fading legend. Outside, it’s more fun. For Dana, Fedor has always been the one that got away (see Karim’s excellent piece), and he’s never been a man to let a grudge go. Remember when Fedor first got tapped out by Werdum, Dana just tweeted a single smiley? Classy. Anyway, Bellator has no chance of competing directly with the UFC, but a Fedor win under Coker will likely irritate White to an inordinate extent, and that’s the next best thing?
David: Sometimes the stakes are little too high when it comes to Fedor’s general quality of life. I don’t know that Dana is all that interested in finally catching his white whale. To quote Vince Vaughn, he has what I believe could accurately be called “blue balls of the heart” at this point. Not only has he been spurned over a garish meal on a small island like Tony Montana meeting high-class drug partners, but Fedor is not what he used to be. Then again, maybe that’s what Dana needs; closure. Like that free agent who is past his prime, but who you know fans will recognize as a nice final gesture. Narcissists require the last word, be it in conversation or history, so who really knows.
Where do they want it?
Phil: It’s difficult to know where Fedor wants the fight these days. In looking back, there’s a tendency to combine together the best of multiple eras to make some kind of superfighter, but Fedor definitely had different key competencies at different points. When he first came on the scene he was largely a grappler and top position ground and pounder; he evolved into something of a pressure fighter around the Cro Cop fight (probably his peak), and then he became something of a winging brawler as he was arguably seduced into believing too much in his power by the Arlovski KO. Thus, even in the establishment of Fedor as a faded fighter, we need to be sure what version we’re talking about rather than just turning down all of the dials from their respective peaks.
The one thing we can draw from his recent fights is that Fedor is definitely closer to his puncher incarnation than his grappler one. He was able to take down and destroy Jaideep Singh, but… c’mon. In the Maldonado fight, Fedor spent the entire time on the feet. Mitrione is someone that Fedor absolutely should take down, but the question is whether that’s something that he tries to do.
David: Fedor’s status grew in part, because he was a malleable fighter when it came to tactics. Grappling wise, he was offensively gifted. On the feet, his raw speed and ridgehand combination punching demanded respect even from K-1 level strikers like Mirko Filipovi?, and his ground and pound was revered as the most violent of its kind. I never really thought of Fedor as an intelligent fighter, per se. After all, large portions of his Pride career were spent wasting the durability of his fists on knocking down uncoordinated kaijus. But, as I said, tactics enhanced what were already elite talents. His third bout with Big Nog was a perfect example. Instead of leaning into the success of the ground and pound from their first bout, he brewed a stew of pressure combinations and takedowns that all but befuddled Nog when he refused to play in Nog’s guard (a tactic Nog explicitly complained about in his post-fight interview).
However, the residue of his late stage tactics as earthy brawler, molded by one too many wasted fights with Japanese wrestlers I’m sure, has stuck with him the most. Which is fine. I agree about his punches in the Maldonado fight. He has lost very little of his raw speed, and the fight itself is something of a miracle in durability. Fedor was OUT, and yet found ways to pressure Fabio in the late stages of that bout. What that says about how he’ll do against Mitrione is another story.
Phil: Mitrione is a good striker. Not a great one, but tough, mobile and well-trained in the dutch kickboxing style. Like other Hooft fighters he’s particularly good at softening up from the outside with leg kicks and then slicing down the outside angle with the left straight or the right hook. This is about as far as his game goes- he has decent first-layer takedown defense, primarily enabled by solid footwork, and can work knees and short shots in the clinch, but is a dismal grappler if someone manages to get past that first layer.
He is (or was) an excellent athlete, so everything is loaded with power and speed. If anyone who’s reading this is thinking “this guy sounds like a technically inferior heavyweight version of Michael Johnson“, you’re basically there.
David: Mitrione never really developed great mechanics, so much as great rhythm. Well, great rhythm in proportion to an ex-football player who made MMA a second career in his mid-thirties. As in, he strikes with a quality flow that’s undercut by not knowing how to make the best use of his angles and footwork. He’s similar to athletes with late growth spurts, who tend to the right things in uncoordinated ways.
I’m not sure his fight with Oli Thompson was a step forward. He came in too aggressively for first strikes, and then too passive backing up, only opening up when Thompson hit a cardio wall and freezed up. Still, his sheer speed, especially when slicing that leg kick down the middle, should allow him to remain successful, whether against Fedor or in the distant future.
Insight from past fights?
Phil: The Maldonado fight is a strange one for me. Everyone talks about how deteriorated Fedor is, but I honestly… don’t really see it all that much? I know this is sort of heresy, but Fedor still looked quick on his feet, and his punches looked sharp. In particular, he had a murderous jab which wasn’t in play for much of his late career. I have a sneaking suspicion that the real problem is that he just wasn’t used to fighting someone who could fight back. Since he achieved deity status in his home country, I’m not convinced that anyone who spars with him ever actually tries to hurt him, a notable problem when combined with a long lay-off. So you get this weird collection of skill, still-decent athleticism and toughness wrapped around a central core which is shocked when his opponents don’t immediately turn into heavy bags.
David: I watch Mitrione’s recent fights, and again going back to his fight with Thompson, and I go one of two ways. Either Fedor takes what Mitrione gives him; space, opportunities on the counter, and limited defense. Or Fedor attempts slugging with Mitrione and gets iced like Fedor officially did against Maldonado. A slugfest both benefits both men, and destroys them.
X-Factors?
Phil: The cage! Ring Fedor, etc.
David: Oh man. I remember getting sucked into these stupid internet debates. Ultimately they should be likened to clay versus grass like in tennis. Damnit, you pulled me back into this!
Prognostication:
Phil: Fedor should absolutely win this. However, he had trouble closing down and attacking someone as footslow as Fabio Maldonado without getting badly hurt, and started exceptionally slowly. For all his many flaws, Mitrione does not start slowly. Matt Mitrione by TKO, round 1.
David: I feel this is tougher than it should be. Mitrione may not start slow, but he’s still defensively porous. Fedor still has some of his trademark speed and Goodridge flow. Maldonado may be a decent striker, but he’s not a great fighter, and Fedor was unofficially beaten by him. It’s hard to imagine Fedor surviving Mitrione’s counter right hook as he backs him up with wide angle combinations. Matt Mitrione by TKO, round 2.
