No. 8-ranked welterweight contender Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson went into last night’s (February 6, 2016) UFC Fight Night 82 from Las Vegas with a chip on his shoulder. Facing off with No. 2-ranked former champion Johny “Bigg Rigg” Hendricks in the night’s main event, Thompson had something to prove, and he did just that. In unexpected
No. 8-ranked welterweight contender Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson went into last night’s (February 6, 2016) UFC Fight Night 82 from Las Vegas with a chip on his shoulder.
Facing off with No. 2-ranked former champion Johny “Bigg Rigg” Hendricks in the night’s main event, Thompson had something to prove, and he did just that.
In unexpected fashion, Thompson came out firing, using his elite level striking to bulldoze through Hendricks, scoring a first round finish and a huge upset over a perennial title contender.
Having taken out one of the division’s best, “Wonderboy” has undoubtedly skyrocketed himself towards the top of the rankings, and should be in line for a huge fight next.
Let’s take a look at four possible options for Thompson:
The UFC welterweight division sports a blistering group of top contenders. Current titleholder Robbie Lawler has heroically defended is throne twice in the past year, putting forth legendary fifth-round surges to power through elite players like Carlos Condit and Rory MacDonald. Since losing the belt to Lawler back at UFC 181, hard-hitting wrestler Johny Hendricks
The UFC welterweight division sports a blistering group of top contenders.
Current titleholder Robbie Lawler has heroically defended is throne twice in the past year, putting forth legendary fifth-round surges to power through elite players like Carlos Condit and Rory MacDonald.
Since losing the belt to Lawler back at UFC 181, hard-hitting wrestler Johny Hendricks is amidst a resurgent run at gold. He will take on rising kickboxer Stephen Thompson this weekend at UFC Fight Night 82.
Patiently waiting on the sidelines is world-class grappling expert Demian Maia, who has quietly compiled a 7-2 record since making his divisional debut back in 2012. Even at 38 years of age, the Brazilian has never looked better.
Not to mention a potential return from the one and only Georges “Rush” St-Pierre.
All of these names make up one of the more intriguing championship pictures in all of mixed martial arts (MMA) entering the 2016 campaign. Former champions, all-time legends, rising superstars, and hardened pros are all vying for their chance to carry the 170-pound torch.
In accordance will the belief that all things are possible inside of the Octagon, here are five new and different paths the welterweight faction may be forced to traverse when the dust finally settles.
Carlos Condit, who lost to Robbie Lawler at UFC 195 in the main event for the welterweight title, expressed interest in a rematch with Lawler in an appearance on the MMA Hour last week. According to Condit, a rematch with Lawler is the only fight that gets a raise in his pulse. Any other fight
Carlos Condit, who lost to Robbie Lawler at UFC 195 in the main event for the welterweight title, expressed interest in a rematch with Lawler in an appearance on the MMA Hour last week. According to Condit, a rematch with Lawler is the only fight that gets a raise in his pulse. Any other fight for Condit is simply something he is not interested in.
“An immediate rematch with Lawler is about the only fight that raises my pulse,” Condit said recently on the MMA Hour. “That I can get interested in. Those other fights are a little bit more, the rematch with Robbie would be, boom, we’d have a bout agreement in the box real quick and we could get that done.”
Condit teased the possibility of retirement from the sport of MMA following UFC 195. This was something that Condit was talking about going into the fight as well. Now, Condit said that he still loves what he does so he is not giving up on his passion as soon as many thought.
“I still love what I do, I still have a lot of fight left in me,” Condit said. “From a looking long-term, I have to do what is right for my health, for my family, things have been difficult the last couple years, my wife has had some health problems that are fairly major, and, you know, these fights are super stressful. Like I said, I absolutely love what I do. I gotta do what’s right for my family. I’m still weighing my options right now.”
“I just spent six months at least training for that fight, went in there, had a war, I’m not in any rush to do anything right now,” he said.
Lawler has also said in the past that he is willing to give Condit a rematch. However, the UFC has yet to comment on what’s next for Lawler. Is this a fight you want to see? Let us know.
Mixed martial arts (MMA) is the most unpredictable sport in the world. Not only when it comes to the elite combat stars that participate inside the Octagon, but also the three knuckleheads that score the action. That’s why UFC President Dana White has repeatedly hammered home the notion that a fighter should never leave it
Mixed martial arts (MMA) is the most unpredictable sport in the world.
Not only when it comes to the elite combat stars that participate inside the Octagon, but also the three knuckleheads that score the action. That’s why UFC President Dana White has repeatedly hammered home the notion that a fighter should never leave it in the hands of the judges.
Yet despite the aforementioned warning, many fights do not end before the clock does. Even in some of the more notable title clashes in promotional history, judges play a more important role than the championship caliber athletes themselves.
It’s a harsh reality when the scoring goes awry, but the sport has not evolved to the point of actually fixing the system across the board.
In accordance with the decisions that just didn’t go the way they were supposed to, here are the four most egregious split-decision calls in UFC championship history.
At least the oddsmakers had this one dialed.
Leading up to Robbie Lawler’s welterweight title defense against Carlos Condit on Saturday at UFC 195, we were told the fight was too close to call.
Nearly every website that offered a betting line sho…
At least the oddsmakers had this one dialed.
Leading up to Robbie Lawler’s welterweight title defense against Carlos Condit on Saturday at UFC 195, we were told the fight was too close to call.
Nearly every website that offered a betting line showed Lawler and Condit in a dead heat. Odds Shark’s Justin Hartling, for example, made the bout a pick ’em in his pre-fight odds and predictions piece, with both men going off at matching minus-115 numbers—and so it was, almost entirely across the board.
This obviously spoke to the incredibly competitive nature of the matchup and the parity at large in the 170-pound division right now.
The point was: We hoped to get some definitive answers from the fight itself.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
It’s possible the outcome only made things murkier.
In the aftermath of Lawler’s split-decision victory, there has been considerable furor over the judges’ verdict and what the UFC should do next. There have been calls to overhaulMMA’s scoring system and renewed cries to do something—anything—about these unreliable ringside officials, who so often appear to watch a different fight than the rest of us.
This time it wasn’t only the judges who appeared conflicted, though. A good many spectators took diametrically opposite views of this bout. The action was so good and so close that almost any opinion was viable.
In the end, perhaps whom we thought won revealed a rift in how some of us watch this crazy sport.
Both Lawler and Condit put on masterclasses in what they do. Their performances may have been starkly different, but they were both stellar.
Condit attempted to overwhelm the champion with volume. His output and diversity of strikes over five rounds was incredible. He said at the post-fight press conference that his game plan was to keep Lawler at bay with kicks and his lengthy jab, disrupting the champ’s rhythm and preventing him from getting into range for his powerful punches.
For the most part, it worked. If this was a football game, Condit would’ve dominated the time of possession, but Lawler was too good to allow the challenger to make it a blowout.
“I think part of the plan went well,” Condit said at the presser. “I think my distancing was good. I was able to make him miss a lot of his big shots, and I was able to catch some of mine. [But] he had his moments where he was able to get into the range that he’s super-dangerous at, that boxing range, and throw those devastating hooks.”
The champion’s offense came in spurts. While Condit chipped away at him more or less nonstop, Lawler engaged in sporadic bursts of violence. For stretches of the fight he would go dormant—credit Condit’s effectiveness for that—but when Lawler saw his openings or sensed some urgency he came forward with sudden flurries of powerful punches. Each time he did, he appeared to hurt his opponent.
We know all about the insane statistics Condit amassed. He threw nearly 500 significant strikes in this fight, according to FightMetric.com. He out-landed Lawler nearly 2-to-1 (176-92) in that department, crafting a historically lopsided differential in a fight in which the guy on the short end of the stick ended up winning.
But Lawler’s punches were harder; they seemed to hurt more. A whopping 89 percent of his significant strikes went to the head, while 80 of Condit’s total strikes landed to either the body or to the legs. In the second round, Lawler floored him with a right hook—the most memorable strike of the fight.
Moreover, each time Lawler went on the attack he wreaked the sort of havoc and caused the kind of damage that historically makes an impression with the judges. When the verdict was announced, we learned that his gambit was successful with two of them.
The rest of us were on our own. Absent any standardized system to value all these disparate techniques and opposing styles, we were left to our own devices.
And maybe our own biases.
If you watched this fight in a more analytical mode, you likely thought Condit won, and you certainly had the numbers to back up that position. Perhaps his work rate spoke to you. Maybe the diversity of his attack seemed like the more well-rounded, more effective performance of mixed martial arts. Perhaps he made Lawler look sluggish and inactive by comparison.
If you watched this fight with your heart on your sleeve and an old-school eye toward damage and violence, Lawler was clearly your guy. He came the closest to finishing the bout, and in the instances in which he hit his highest gear—especially when he was able to trap Condit near the fence—he appeared to instantly swing the momentum in his favor.
That included the vitally important final round, in which Lawler mustered the endurance and drive to come out guns blazing and salt away his second successful title defense.
“He’s our EvanderHolyfield, man,” UFC President Dana White said of Lawler at the post-fight media conference. “He’s never in a boring fight. When he gets hurt, he continues to go toe-to-toe. I respect so much when you’re in a fight like this and you have to come out in the fifth round and do what Robbie did—and he did it.”
At the risk of oversimplifying, maybe it came down to this: If you watched this fight with your head, you likely thought Condit won.
If you watched with your gut, Lawler got your nod.
Neither approach is explicitly right or wrong. After all (at least for the spectators), this is supposed to be fun. Watch the fights any way you see fit. It stands to reason that in a sport as nuanced and sometimes wacky as MMA, there’s always going to be a wealth of divergent opinions swirling around big fights.
Statistics are nice, and the people who compile them do impressive yeoman’s work. In a modern athletic culture becoming more and more reliant on analytics, it seems important that MMA tries to keep up, devising some hard and fast way to quantify and evaluate performances.
Yet at this point, the numbers frequently don’t tell the whole story. Not every punch or kick is created equal.
MMA remains a sport that deserves—sometimes demands—to be watched with as much emotion as reason. It’s a sport that still demands to actually be watched. Often your eyes will tell you things about a fight that the numbers will not.
Or at least that’s what Lawler’s supporters would probably argue this week.
As the dust settles, the one area that leaves absolutely no wiggle room is that he’s still the champ. The way forward for the 170-pound division is somewhat less clear-cut, though in the spirit he’s exhibited since coming to the Octagon as a precocious 20-year-old in 2002, Lawler has made it clear he’s down for whatever.
Meanwhile, Condit says he’s considering retirement. He came razor-close to capturing the undisputed UFC title but—at least on the official scorecards—came up just short. In the hours immediately following that disappointment, he indicated he will require some soul-searching before he knows if he can go on.
The smart money says that no matter what happens, controversy will continue to swirl around these guys for a little while. From the sidelines, we’ll have all the same discussions we always have after close fights and hinky decisions. We’ll propose rule changes, whole-cloth scoring alterations and continuing education classes for judges.
It’s true that the system could certainly be improved, though there is no potential change to the rulebook that will eliminate close fights.
It also seems unlikely that there will be a change that prevents some of us from seeing exactly what we want to see.
Robbie Lawler and Carlos Condit went to war on Saturday night at UFC 195.
The champion walked away with his belt—but not without controversy. Per Fightmetric, Condit outlanded Lawler by 84 significant strikes, the largest margin for a losing figh…
The champion walked away with his belt—but not without controversy. Per Fightmetric, Condit outlanded Lawler by 84 significant strikes, the largest margin for a losing fighter in the history of the UFC. On the other hand, Lawler dropped some absolute bombs on the challenger, including a knockdown in the second round and a sustained flurry of violence in the fifth and final frame.
Other pieces have addressed the debate over scoring and its implications, so we won’t do that here; instead, we’ll take a look at some of the technical aspects of Condit’s and Lawler’s donnybrook. Several other bouts showcased high-level technique, especially the slick scrap between Lorenz Larkin and Albert Tumenov and the Fight Pass headliner that featured Dustin Poirier and Joseph Duffy.
Robbie Lawler vs. Carlos Condit
Both fighters came into this fight with distinct and identifiable game plans, both of which worked to some extent.
Lawler had clearly decided that he couldn’t match Condit’s insane work rate over the course of the fight; instead, he committed to a two-pronged strategy intended to minimize Condit’s ability to impose his crushing pace and launch into crazy bursts of violence.
The first part of that strategy consisted of stalking and putting Condit’s back against the fence. The challenger isn’t terribly dangerous off his back foot: He offers little as a counterpuncher, and while he has a good sense of where he is in the cage, he relies more on big movements and misdirection than tight pivots and turns.
With little to fear from Condit in that position, Lawler could land a big, memorable flurry like the one that won him the third round on two judges’ scorecards. To his credit, though, Condit did a good job of staying off the fence, and he mostly limited the effectiveness of Lawler’s pressure.
The second piece of Lawler’s strategy revolved around consistent movement, with tight pivots and lateral steps that kept him out of Condit’s woodchipper-like wheelhouse of knees, elbows and punching flurries. Condit is lethal when he can put his opponent’s back against the fence, and Lawler never let himself get pushed back that far. Yes, he ate a ton of kicks to the legs and body, but at no point was he in true danger.
When he deemed the time right as Condit attacked, Lawler stopped, planted his feet and exploded into a vicious counter combination. That’s how he dropped the challenger in the second round with a right hook.
Condit’s approach to the fight revolved around pace, offensive output and overloading his opponent with information.
The champion doesn’t get enough credit for being a sharp counterpuncher. In fact, the incarnation of Lawler that has been so successful in the last several years is one of the most cerebral and therefore most dangerous in the sport today. Counterpunching relies on the ability to time your opponent, judge the distance and pick the right shot at the right time. That requires intelligence, experience and patience.
Think of a counterpuncher as a computer. He takes in information about distance, rhythm and timing, processes it and then spits out the correct answer in the form of the proper counter to whatever his opponent will throw next.
Condit engaged in the classic strategy for confusing a smart counterpuncher. His constant barrage of punches and kicks in odd combinations—he went from kicks to punches, punches to kicks and followed one kick with another—overloaded Lawler with information. The challenger’s command of long range often left Lawler too far outside to land his preferred punches as well.
There were too many cues for the smart, observant Lawler to choose from, and so for long stretches of the fight, the champion did basically nothing while Condit hit him from too far away for Lawler to hit him back.
That consistent output of strikes not only confused Lawler and took away his dangerous counterpunches for long stretches of the fight, they also scored. In general, the fighter who consistently lands more strikes in every round tends to win them. Condit outlanded Lawler by a substantial margin in practically every round, even the second, when the champion scored a vicious knockdown.
The fact that Lawler still had enough left to launch one of the most devastating bursts of violence the sport has ever seen in the final frame is a testament to his durability. Most fighters would have wilted and seen their gas tanks drain long before the fifth round, and that’s almost certainly what Condit and his coaches intended.
The debate over this fight’s scoring is in large part a function of these game plans. Lawler was never going to outland Condit over five rounds, and even more so in this fight since he barely used the sharp, effective jab he’d shown in his last several fights. If he was going to win, it either needed to be by knockout or by producing moments big enough to outweigh Condit’s consistent volume.
As it turned out, that was enough to convince two of the three judges, but not most of the media or a large number of fans.
Albert Tumenov vs. Lorenz Larkin
While it didn’t turn into the violence-fest that many anticipated, Tumenov and Larkin did put on a heck of a technical striking matchup. It was close, and it showed the best versions of both fighters that we’ve seen in the Octagon.
The fight was a study in contrasting strike locations: Per Fightmetric, 47 of Larkin’s 69 landed strikes were to the legs, while Tumenov attacked Larkin’s body and head with 71 of his 76 landed strikes. The second round clearly went to the Russian, who flurried repeatedly with hard body shots, and the third went to Larkin’s vicious assault on Tumenov’s legs.
The first was the deciding round, and two of the three judges sided with Tumenov’s sharp right hands to the head rather than Larkin’s stinging low kicks.
Both fighters showcased high-level technique. The highlight of the fight for Larkin was the spinning heel kicks he landed to Tumenov’s leg in the third round. The late K-1 champion Andy Hug made them famous in the 1990s, and only a few fighters have ever thrown them in MMA. They further damaged Tumenov’s already welted leg and left him hobbling, though it was too little, too late.
Tumenov’s highlights might not even stand out at first glance. He did an outstanding job of landing sharp counters throughout the fight, beginning with straight rights in response to Larkin’s low kicks and continuing on to backstepping counters and combinations in the pocket as Larkin moved forward.
While Larkin kept kicking, he ate so many counters to his punches that it effectively shut down his ability to land shots to Tumenov’s head. The statistics bear this out: Tumenov is normally somewhat hittable, but Larkin landed only 12 head shots the entire fight. The American had trouble committing to full-force shots knowing that something sharper would be coming right back.
Dustin Poirier vs. Joseph Duffy
The best Fight Pass preliminary bout ever turned into an excellent fight. Duffy had his moments and showed off some of his sharp striking, but the story of the fight was Poirier’s cool under fire and ability to make the right decisions in the midst of the fight.
Experience and diversity won this fight for Poirier. A veteran of 14 fights in the UFC, Poirer has a full set of skills, and he switched things up either in response to what he saw from Duffy or by design, as part of his game plan.
Poirier came out throwing bombs on the feet, but Duffy laced him with jabs and sharp right hands from the opening bell. The Irishman’s sharp footwork gave Poirier fits, particularly when Duffy was able to stick the American on the end of his longer straight punches. He also showcased a surprising ability in exchanges, landing combinations in the pocket and using tight footwork to avoid the return shots.
Where Poirier found his groove was in the clinch and on the mat. When he tied up with Duffy, the American was able to land hard short punches in the clinch. He alternated between right hooks over the top and right uppercuts up the middle, using a single collar tie with his left hand to hold Duffy’s head in place.
The more salient part of Poirier’s approach was his experience in working against the fence, an MMA-specific skill set that his camp at American Top Team teaches well. He excelled at cage wrestling, driving Duffy’s hips against the fence, switching techniques and then sucking him away.
The Irishman wasn’t able to get anything going off his back because his hips had nowhere to go, and Poirier ate up the second and third rounds from top position. Hard elbows and punches, many of them delivered in brutal fashion, cemented those two rounds to give Poirier a clean decision.
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.
At least the 