Sunday’s bantamweight title matchup between current champion T.J. Dillashaw and former beltholder Dominick Cruz is a great fight by any standard.
It’s one more iteration of Cruz vs. Urijah Faber and his proteges, although Dillashaw‘s departure from Team Alpha Male takes a bit of the sting out of that particular narrative. It’s the former champion, who lost the belt only through injury, against the current titleholder, a rare happening in itself. It’s Cruz’s attempt to return from a series of devastating injuries that have limited him to only one fight in the last four years.
Most of all, however, it represents a clash of the old and the new and of two generationally different approaches to MMA. The game has changed since 2011, and Dillashaw embodies those changes. Volume and combination work in conjunction with rock-solid striking fundamentals, and a mastery of transitions is the new normal at the elite levels of MMA. Nobody does that better than Dillashaw.
It’s been almost 16 months since Cruz fought—and 51 since he found himself the center of attention at the top of a well-promoted card. First, we’ll take a look at his game and what made him so dominant, then explore Dillashaw‘s game and how the two match up.
Most of the fan and commentator attention on Cruz focuses on his unorthodox movement and footwork on the feet, and at first glance, that’s what stands out the most about his game.
He circles and side-steps, switches stances, cuts angles and then leaps in with a darting jab, right hand or kick. All of this is constant and happens seemingly without an identifiable rhythm or preferred direction, which makes it difficult to anticipate and time. This makes Cruz hard to hit and even harder to hit cleanly, as he’s rarely in range, while consistent head movement adds another layer of difficulty.
There’s nothing particularly unusual about Cruz’s shot selection. His jab is crisp and consistent, the lead right hand is a staple, he hits nice uppercuts as counters to his opponent’s level changes and has some pop in his kicks. The occasional flying or stepping knee adds variety. In general, however, volume and attrition are Cruz’s hallmarks rather than power.
By the standards of 2011, Cruz worked at a great pace on the feet. He piled up 90 significant strikes against Faber and 117 against Scott Jorgensen, which were exceptionally high numbers for the time. Nick and Nate Diaz’s volume-heavy performances against B.J. Penn and Donald Cerrone, respectively, were still in the future. That kind of combination work wasn’t yet the norm.
Moreover, Cruz’s constant movement forced his opponents to continuously be on the move themselves, which further forced them to expend energy.
This was all cutting-edge stuff when Cruz was in his prime, and it sufficed against fighters like Jorgensen, Faber and Joseph Benavidez. Demetrious Johnson gave him some trouble on the feet, but Cruz simply went to the overlooked but best part of his game, his wrestling and grappling games.
As skilled and unorthodox a striker as he is, Cruz’s real strength lies in the transitions. He excels at using his strikes to draw out a counter and then ducking under for a reactive double-leg takedown, as he did here to Faber. Once in on his opponent’s hips, an endless chain of singles, doubles, knee-taps and trips in the clinch follow. Clean, technical finishes follow his clever entries and make for a difficult package to stuff.
On the mat, Cruz was one of the pioneers of the rinse-and-repeat, scramble-heavy style of takedowns and immediate positional advancements that are now common. Rather than looking to work a slow-paced, grinding top game of strikes and passes, Cruz simply hit the takedown, let his opponent try to scramble and then looked for strikes and dominant positions in the transition, where openings are easier to find.
That’s exactly what he did in his return engagement against Takeya Mizugaki. He took Mizugaki down, Mizugaki scrambled and Cruz hit a mat return; and then, in a position where Mizugaki thought they’d be wrestling, Cruz rained down strikes. It’s brilliant transitional work.
Seemingly endless cardio and a natural understanding of how to use the space of the cage to his advantage round out a unique package that embodied the best of MMA in 2011.
The game has changed since then. The biggest difference between then and the present day is volume. Cruz was once one of the most active strikers in the game; now, fighters like Conor McGregor, Joanna Jedrzejczyk and even heavyweights like Fabricio Werdum are piling up landed strikes.
No fighter embodies that trend better than Dillashaw. His striking game looks superficially like an updated version of Cruz’s, with similarly odd and unpredictable lateral movement, stance switches and angles.
The difference is output and technical soundness. Where Cruz is content to stick a single jab or right hand and then angle off and reset, Dillashaw stays on his opponent. He uses stance-switches to cover distance as he moves forward, which keeps him glued on as his opponent tries to escape and gives him a vast array of offensive options.
Here’s one combination he threw against Joe Soto: Beginning in the orthodox stance, he slammed home a left hook to the body, then went upstairs with a left hook to the head, straight right, and another left hook. He then stepped forward into southpaw and dropped consecutive right hooks to the head, feinted a right jab, followed with a straight left and stepped forward into orthodox.
That combination consisted of seven shots in four seconds, of which Dillashaw landed three. The champion can land combinations like that while maintaining Cruz-style unpredictable footwork because his striking fundamentals are so substantially sounder. Cruz could never, for example, stand in front of his opponent long enough to land a combination like this.
Cruz often fails to keep his feet under him as he throws, which robs him of the ability to get proper weight transfer into his strikes. His bodyweight is moving in a different direction than the line of the punch, which is a sacrifice Cruz is willing to make in exchange for finding angles from which to safely land and then escape.
Dillashaw doesn’t have to make that trade. Yes, he darts in and out and slips to the side like Cruz does, often finding himself to the side or even behind his opponent, but when the champion throws strikes, he’s never reaching his head over his lead leg or standing square to his opponent. He can plant his feet and throw flurries like the one in the above GIF, knowing that he’s still able to escape when he needs to.
Whether it’s because of Cruz’s extreme prioritization of defense over offense or simply because Dillashaw genuinely has better footwork—it’s probably a bit of both—the net effect of all that is greater offensive output for the current champion.
Dillashaw doesn’t have to move as far to get into range, and he’s more willing to take relatively safe risks for the sake of landing. His footwork leads directly to both of those.
Although he relies on it much less than Cruz, Dillashaw is also an outstanding wrestler. He was an accomplished Division I competitor at Cal State Fullerton, and his slick mat wrestling has translated beautifully to an emphasis on transitions in MMA.
While much of what Cruz does on the feet is intended to set up his slick takedowns, Dillashaw is much more of a striker by preference whose wrestling and grappling serve as strong secondary skills. The champion has never officially been taken down, and he owns an arsenal of smooth, technically finished singles, doubles and knee-taps.
Like Cruz, Dillashaw is happy to let his opponent scramble underneath him. Where Cruz looks to land strikes in transition and occasionally get a positional advancement, Dillashaw has one overarching goal: getting to the back. He has a series of back-takes that range from the basic, such as spinning around from the front headlock, to the exotic.
The champion came of age as a fighter in an environment, Team Alpha Male, where those kinds of transitions were second nature. Faber and Benavidez were pioneers of that style, and it’s one that Cruz too has mastered. It was cutting-edge stuff when Cruz was the champion, but now it’s a standard part of a fighter like Dillashaw‘s skill sets.
And that’s the essence of this fight and why I’m picking Dillashaw to win. Cruz introduced the MMA world to unorthodox lateral movement and odd angles, what Joe Rogan terms “neo footwork,” and Dillashaw has mastered it.
For Cruz, that footwork and movement were largely defensive, but Dillashaw uses it to pressure his opponent toward the fence and move around in the pocket in addition to escaping. It allows him to control the distance and angles in much smaller and more versatile chunks than it does for Cruz. Sometimes he pulls back and resets, and other times he only drops back a step before launching a hard counter.
The combination of footwork and aggressiveness allows Dillashaw to land at a higher rate, and his better striking fundamentals and greater natural power make him infinitely more dangerous. He’s an accomplished wrestler himself; nothing Cruz does in transition is revolutionary to someone who spent years surrounded by fighters like Faber and Benavidez.
The differences between the two fighters show how much MMA has changed in the last four years. In 2011, transitional geniuses like Georges St-Pierre and Cruz ruled their divisions, and now the reactive double-leg and knee on the clinch break are standard practice.
We used to be wowed by Cruz’s output and cardio. Not only has Dillashaw taken it a step further; light heavyweights such as Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones now routinely land at a higher rate than the former bantamweight titleholder.
Even heavyweight champion Fabricio Werdum is following suit: He landed nearly eight strikes per minute against Cain Velasquez in June and dropped 120 in 25 minutes against Travis Browne in April 2014, both marks better than Cruz’s career best.
That’s not to say Cruz can’t win. He’s exceptionally smart and has a knack for making the right decisions in fights. And if he can take down Dillashaw a few times—a tall order—then Cruz might be able to make Dillashaw hesitate enough to slow down the champion’s substantially quicker pace.
That seems less likely than Dillashaw stuffing the takedowns and simply outlanding Cruz on the feet, though. The game has changed in fundamental ways in the last four years, and Dillashaw embodies those changes better than any other fighter in the game.
Patrick Wyman is the Senior MMA Analyst for Bleacher Report and the co-host of the Heavy Hands Podcast, your source for the finer points of face-punching. He can be found on Twitter.
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