Filed under: UFC, FanHouse Exclusive, News
Chael Sonnen almost shocked the MMA world at UFC 117 when he came minutes away from snatching the middleweight title belt from Anderson Silva. Of course, his near-perfect performance ended in heartbreak when he was submitted in the late stages of the fifth round.
We’ll know later next year if Sonnen learned anything from that night in Oakland, Calif., but one thing’s for certain: thousands of miles away in New Jersey, Frankie Edgar, the UFC lightweight champion who was gearing up to defend his title against BJ Penn just three weeks later, learned a valuable lesson while watching Sonnen’s loss to Silva.
“I learned some stuff from Chael that night,” Edgar said on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour. “He was just constant pressure and didn’t give Anderson a chance to breathe except for that one second that he got caught in the triangle. So I kind of tried to learn from that; to put the pressure on but don’t be reckless while you are doing so.”
Unlike Sonnen, Edgar fought the perfect fight at UFC 118. He dominated Penn for five full rounds and proved that his UFC 112 win over “The Prodigy” was no fluke after all.