UFC 194 on Saturday features two of the biggest title fights in UFC history, as Conor McGregor challenges Jose Aldo for the featherweight belt and Chris Weidman defends his middleweight strap against Luke Rockhold.
I caught up with UFC color commentator, Fox Sports analyst and former UFC middleweight Brian Stann to break down the two most important fights of the weekend.
Patrick Wyman: Let’s start with Aldo-McGregor. It seems like the two real keys to the fight are where in the cage the fight is going to take place—whether it’s going to be toward the fence with McGregor pushing Aldo back or out in the middle, where Aldo would probably prefer it—and the pace at which they fight, with McGregor preferring to work much faster than Aldo. Who do you think wins those battles?
Brian Stann: I think it really depends on which Jose Aldo shows up. We know what Conor McGregor is going to do. He’s a mentally strong fighter despite all the hype surrounding him, and he’s created massive stages for a guy who only has a few UFC fights. He’s lived up to it every time. I fully expect him to step forward from the first bell to try to implement his game plan.
We’ve seen Aldo sit back a little bit and coast in several of his title defenses, but then we’ve also seen him get aggressive. Most of the time when we’ve seen him get aggressive is when guys try to back him up, so my best guess is that McGregor is going to force an aggressive Aldo.
Then the question becomes, if they’re both going to try to push forward, who’s going to win? Who’s going to land the first shot that really hurts the other guy? The guy who gets hurt will be the first one to angle off and not put out as much pressure.
PW: So speaking of Aldo getting aggressive, do you think it should be his goal to try to fight McGregor in the pocket—to just stand his ground and fire back when McGregor tries to move forward?
BS: I think he does want to get in close; Conor is so big and so long.
The other factor that I’m sure many people are talking about are leg kicks. [Because of his wide stance] Conor‘s leg, being out there as much as it is, is a real factor.
Now if I were McGregor, I’d bait him and want him to kick the leg, and as soon as he goes for it, raise the leg and check. If he does that, just like against the Korean Zombie, we won’t see many leg kicks. Without that blistering leg kick, Aldo is a different fighter. He can hurt you with his other weapons—the left hook, for example—but in a war of attrition, the best thing he has is that leg kick.
I think that is going to be a real key—whether Conor defends that leg kick early and tries to take it out of the equation. Because Jose kicks so hard, if Conor checks one, the likelihood that Aldo hurts himself is so high.
The other part of the equation that a lot of people are forgetting is Aldo’s takedowns. When he fought the Korean Zombie, when he fought Ricardo Lamas, we saw a lot of takedowns. His coaching staff and his training partners have spoken about this fight in particular, and they’re very confident in his offensive wrestling.
Most people only see the defensive side of it; we just forget, mostly because those fights weren’t that exciting, that he can get inside and that he has some really good body-locks, good trips, takedowns against the fence.
There are guys who are good on the ground, and there are black belts on the ground. Aldo is world-class, and that could be a real X-factor as well.
PW: So on that note, McGregor‘s coach John Kavanagh talked about him having hurt his knee prior to the fight with Chad Mendes and said that this affected his ability to drill live wrestling. Even if that’s the case, it doesn’t really explain why McGregor was so inactive off his back against Mendes, right?
BS: Exactly, though part of the injury could have affected his ability to utilize the butterfly guard. Most guys who are really experts at getting off their back, for example Michael Bisping, rely on at least one butterfly hook.
I use it often as well. If I want to get back to my feet, I use my guard to create a little bit of space by pushing off the hips, insert the butterfly hook and use that to scoot back to the fence where I can get my underhook.
If Conor‘s knee was hurt, maybe he just couldn’t go for that. Or he may just have been overly comfortable on his back, thinking, “Hey, Chad’s gonna gas, I’ll let him wear himself out a little bit and hopefully take him out in the later rounds.” There could have been a lot of factors in that matchup.
The interesting part here is whether Conor drills well to get right back to his feet, Jose isn’t going to have the kind of instant top pressure that someone like Chad Mendes would have. Jose has a more jiu-jitsu-based top game: They take you down, and then they take a second where they really have to solidify the position.
I’ve always thought they were easier to get up on, whereas wrestlers, when they take you down, they immediately scramble to a really heavy position, and you have to work a lot harder to get back to your feet.
There are so many fun things to break down that we just haven’t seen from McGregor yet. The only thing we really have to go with on the ground for him is the fight with Chad, who has a much different style of top game than Jose Aldo.
PW: It seems like Mendes, for as good a wrestler as he’s been over the course of his career, hasn’t really been a violent top player. He’ll take guys down and use it as a breather, but against Conor McGregor he was the most violent we’ve ever seen him from top position. He really managed to posture up and do quite a bit of damage. Conversely, that’s something we’ve seen from Aldo all along: Pretty much whenever he has gotten on top, he’s postured up and managed to land hard shots. Do you think that bodes poorly for McGregor?
BS: It absolutely does. When we look back at Aldo’s jiu-jitsu career, before he started fighting, he submitted guys who are considered some of the very best in the world right now. He had to leave it because there was no money in it, but that’s the level of ground game he has. When you talk to coaches at Nova Uniao, they tell you that Aldo rips through people at that gym, and those are high-level, quality guys.
Any one of us who breaks down tape on Aldo can see that he’s arguably the best athlete in the UFC. You’ve got guys like him, you’ve got guys like Yoel Romero, with their explosiveness, their speed, their fast-twitch ability, and it’s really impressive to watch them work. Jon Jones, Georges St-Pierre, too. I’d put Jose Aldo up there with every single one of them.
PW: Do you have a prediction for this fight, or would you rather keep that under wraps?
BS: From the film study I’ve done right now, I’d give a slight edge to Aldo. All of that being said, I have one caveat.
We cannot take for granted the mental game of McGregor. I think that side is a fantastic component that you can’t analyze. He gets in your face, he trash-talks you, you hit him and he tells you that was nothing.
Through his interviews before the fight, he’s looking to plant those seeds of doubt, and then when he gets you into the Octagon and stars trash-talking you, he’s watering those seeds and waiting for the doubt to manifest itself. He works on it and works on it and works on it, and then all of the sudden, Chad gets tired and Conor wins.
I believe he had Dustin Poirier defeated before the fight even started. I remember watching him before he walked out to the Octagon, and he wasn’t there. That wasn’t the same Poirier that I saw fight in New Orleans in the fight that I called last June.
That’s a factor and a component that Aldo is going to have to overcome as well, and it can’t just be anger-based; it can’t just be “Hey, I’m mad, he touched my belt, he insulted my country, I’m gonna get him.” Many times, we’ve seen that anger is not the appropriate emotion to use inside the Octagon in a five-round fight against a world-class opponent.
PW: I feel like we could talk about just this matchup all day, but there are just so many good fights to break down, so let’s move on to Weidman-Rockhold.
With Aldo-McGregor it seems fairly clear what the major battles are going to be—pressure, pace, whether Aldo can hit takedowns, etc.—even if we don’t know who’s going to win them. On the other hand, I have no earthly idea what Weidman-Rockhold is going to look like. After your film study, how do you think this is going to go down?
BS: This fight, for guys like me and you who are into technique and love the technical analysis, is our dream. We can analyze this and say it’s going to go one of 30 different ways; there are going to be a few people who guess right, but honest to God, this is a coin-toss of a 30-sided coin.
In my opinion, this is the best middleweight title fight we’ve ever had, and that includes Anderson Silva vs. Chris Weidman, which many people will argue over until they’re blue in the face.
But when you look at the people Rockhold has defeated and how he’s done it after the Vitor Belfort fight, you’ve got two guys who are the most skilled in every area we’ve ever seen. While Rockhold‘s striking isn’t on par with Anderson Silva’s, his wrestling game is better, and he’s better on the ground as well.
The edge in wrestling goes to Chris. He is going to go out there, very similar to how he did in the early rounds against Lyoto Machida, and he’s going to want to get right in Luke’s face—to put pressure on him and start making him nervous, to take away the poise that he has.
When he puts that pressure on Rockhold, when he starts punching that hornet’s nest, he has to be careful. Rockhold is one of the very best strikers in the UFC when he’s going backward. A lot of guys felt well going forward; Rockhold has knocked guys out going backward.
His kicks are notorious; I’ve talked to a lot of people who train with him, and even guys who say, “Don’t say my name, I don’t want him to know, but when I sparred that guy every time he kicked me I lost the will.” And Rockhold has fought this style before: He beat Jacare, he beat Tim Kennedy—and that was a younger, less dynamic Luke Rockhold.
Chris has to find a way to consistently get him down and mix it up, because without the takedowns Chris’ striking is good, but it’s not on par with Luke’s. What could make Chris look better as a striker and surprise people, like Chael Sonnen surprised Anderson Silva, is the threat of his takedown opening up his strikes.
He has to be active in both arenas first. He can’t just go out there and strike with him like he did with Machida; this guy is a little bit too powerful for that. He has to mix both in.
PW: So even if he’s not going to complete the takedown, he needs to use the threat of the level change and the forward movement to open up his shots upstairs?
BS: Exactly, and if he really pushes for it, he’s going to get the takedown. Chris’ mixed martial arts wrestling is fantastic, and I think he can get Luke down.
Then the real fun part begins. Chris executes ground-and-pound pretty ruthlessly. I’ve never seen a guy posture up the way he did against Anderson Silva, because the risk of him getting back up is so great if you give him that space. But Chris didn’t care; he was really trying to knock out Silva with his ground-and-pound. He was just that comfortable with wrestling him back down to the ground if he tried to get up.
Will Chris be that confident with Luke, with a guy who can wrestle as well and is also very tricky on the ground? Will he unleash, or will he try to stay a little bit tighter and grind the fight down a little bit more? That’s what I wonder.
And when Luke tries to get back up, Chris is really tricky. He can work to a cradle or a front headlock, and he’s difficult from that position. On the other hand, if you try to play in Luke’s guard, he catches you when you try to pass. There are a lot of tricks these guys have on the ground, and I’m hoping the fight plays out on the ground a little bit so they can showcase just how well-rounded they are.
PW: It’s a really fascinating matchup in the in-between spaces where they’ll be scrambling. On that note, do you think it’s better for Weidman to shoot with Rockhold up against the cage or in open space? If he shoots up against the cage, Rockhold is a great cage wrestler and it’ll be hard to get him down, but if he shoots in open space, he risks running into Rockhold‘s front headlock game.
So it ends up being a Catch-22 situation of where you can force Rockhold to go on the ground to have some sort of edge on him.
BS: The best space is in the middle of the Octagon. Chris’ best bet is to try a high crotch dump in the middle of the Octagon and try to catch him off guard. When Luke fought Jacare, it was a lot of takedowns against the fence; Luke is so good at defending them there, and he uses it to walk right back up.
I think it’s important for Chris to try to take him down in the middle of the Octagon, though he’s going to be pressuring him, and he’ll want Luke’s back close to the fence for those strikes as well. I’m sure he’s going to try to attempt takedowns there, but don’t look for the double there; pick him up, turn around and drop him in the middle of the Octagon.
Patrick Wyman is the Senior MMA Analyst for Bleacher Reporter and the co-host of the Heavy Hands Podcast, your source for the finer points of face-punching. He can be found on Twitter.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com