In the main event of the evening, Mark Munoz continued his rise by defeating Chris Leben.
Two competitive rounds of Munoz’s intermittent ground and pound resulted in enough damage to Leben’s face for his corner to call a stoppage.
It is likely that Munoz’s next opponent will be the winner of Miller vs. Bisping. Munoz thinks he’s already proven himself though, and said he’s ready for the champion, Anderson Silva.
While Munoz did come out with the win over a dangerous opponent, nothing about his win indicated he was ready for the champion, or even the top five of the division.
Munoz’s greatest strength is his ground and pound. However, he doesn’t have the elite MMA wrestling to go along with it.
There’s no denying how impressive his pure wrestling is. He is easily one of the most credentialed college wrestlers to ever try his hand at MMA.
But his MMA wrestling simple isn’t as good. This was made abundantly clear in his loss to Yushin Okami. He succeeded in only 1-of-15 takedown attempts and did no damage on his successful takedown.
He would later be outwrestled by C.B. Dollaway before securing an impressive knockout victory, and landed less than half of his takedown attempts on Maia.
Even against Leben, Munoz was often able to get back to his feet without much damage. He even took down Munoz a few times.
If his standup were good enough to beat those enemies whom he couldn’t take down, then would still be a threat to top middleweights.
However, this simply isn’t the case.
In between stopping the vast majority of Munoz’s takedown attempts, Okami bested Munoz on the feet. Munoz would later arguably be outstruck by Maia.
Both Maia and Okami are unspectacular strikers. Maia has been improving, and his performance against Munoz was his best display, but historically his striking has been poor and his striking didn’t look too sharp against Santiago.
Ultimately, there is no top-five middleweight that Munoz has a huge striking advantage or huge grappling advantage over.
There’s no reason to believe Munoz would grapple much better against Okami if the two fought again. And if Okami could best Munoz, it should be easy to imagine what Sonnen could do to him.
And given his performances over Maia and Okami, it’s easy to imagine what Belfort, Stann and Silva could do to Munoz. While he’d have a wrestling advantage over those three, it wouldn’t be big enough to compensate for his huge striking disadvantage.
Munoz is an average striker and an above average wrestler, and he will probably continue to find some success before being pushed for a title shot. But in a division whose upper echelon has some of the best grapplers and greatest strikers in the sport, Munoz falls short.
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