Tag: Demetrious Johnson

UFC 197, which takes place Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, features the UFC’s two best pound-for-pound fighters. Jon Jones and Demetrious Johnson have combined for a ridiculous 15 title defenses, and aside from close run-ins with Alexander Gustafsson and John Dodson, respectively, neither has even been particularly challenged.

Johnson is the only flyweight champion in the promotion’s history. He has held the belt since 2012, when he won a competitive but clear fight with Joseph Benavidez.

His first title defense against Dodson was the only one of those that was ever in any doubt, as the Albuquerque, New Mexico, native planted him on the canvas with a big left hand in the second round. Despite that knockdown, Johnson still out-landed the challenger at a more than two-to-one clip. The fifth round in particular was a blowout, and the final decision was never really in doubt.

Jones’ sole close fight, a decision win over Gustafsson, never had a single moment as scary as Dodson’s knockdown. Instead, an unmotivated Jones looked listless while winning only one of the first three rounds. He finally turned it on in the fourth when his Swedish challenger tired, landing a sublime spinning elbow to turn the tide.

While they’re opposites in terms of physical dimensions—Jones stands 6’4″ and weighs in at 205 pounds, while Johnson clocks in at a mere 5’3″ and 125—the two pound-for-pound kings share one essential trait in common: They get better over the five-round length of a title fight and are even better in the fifth round than they are in the first. In fact, neither has lost a championship round since they began their reigns.

That isn’t an accident; it’s a consistent facet of both fighters’ games, a product of exceptional conditioning and a commitment to wearing down the opposition combined with intelligence in the cage, smart coaching and sharp adjustments over the course of the fight. Each of those things works together with the others to create a fighter who gets better from minute to minute and round to round.

Whatever you might say about Jones’ decision-making in his life outside of fighting, there’s no disputing his fight IQ. He consistently makes the right choices, whether that is deciding when to stop and throw a strike as his opponent pressures, when to move into the clinch, when to shoot for a takedown or when to throw an out-of-nowhere spinning elbow, as he did to Gustafsson in the fourth round of a grueling fight.

In the cage, Jones is genius in action. He reads his opponent and reacts, adapting organically to what his adversary shows him. Jabs and hand-traps open up step-in elbows, while body kicks expose the head.

Johnson does the same thing but to an even more extreme degree. Take his second fight with Dodson as an example.

Early on, the champion struggled to get in on Dodson’s hips for a double-leg takedown despite his best setups with punches and clean angles on his entries. Having realized this, Johnson instead switched to grabbing a single leg, forgoing the double. In the middle of the cage, Dodson still managed to stuff the single.

The next time Johnson grabbed the single, instead of trying to finish in open space, he used it to push Dodson toward the fence and tried to finish it there by running the pipe. Again, Dodson stuffed it. When Johnson grabbed the single a third time, he didn’t even try to finish once he got Dodson to the fence. Instead, he started landing punches and elbows while holding Dodson’s leg.

Every one of Johnson’s fights includes multiple sequences like this. Both he and Jones process information under pressure at an incredible rate, and everything their opponents do simply gets them deeper into trouble.

The champions’ minds seem to work like flow charts, where their opponents’ inputs simply lead to the next set of options, and so on until all possible defenses have been exhausted. Eventually, it seems, Johnson and Jones will find something that works, whether that’s a spinning elbow, single-leg sequence or clinch entry.

Coaching plays an enormous role in this dynamic. As good as Johnson and Jones are at making their own adjustments mid-round, even more happens on the stool.

Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn, one of the most productive coaching pairings in MMA history, are fixtures in Jones’ corner. Here’s a snippet of the advice they offered Jones after his second round against Cormier, one of the more competitive rounds of his career.

Jackson: “Hey, Jon, slow your heart rate down. Slow down.”

Winkeljohn: “You’re holding him with your southpaw nines [code for a strike, presumably the straight left]. You’re holding him, and then you’re leaving your head down and following with fives [another code, probably a right uppercut], all right? Nines to fives, and knee his body. Slow him down. Greg?”

Jackson: “Knee his body and keep him off your head [in the clinch].”

You can see here how their advice is tailored to center Jones mentally while adjusting to what Cormier had shown over the course of the round, which was heavy on fighting in the clinch. Here, they have given Jones advice on sticking Cormier at range (southpaw nines and fives) and how to react when the challenger does get inside (knees to the body). 

Here’s Matt Hume in the corner with Johnson between the first and second rounds of the rematch with Dodson.

Hume: “Less in and out now and more straight in. You’re getting him to back up; you can get him to back up, your right hand is backing him up a lot too, and your kick is backing him up, the high kick, so you gotta follow that in.”

Johnson: “OK.”

Hume: “Once you track him around and you start going in and out and hesitating, then he gets to come back forward…that pressure, that clinch [the result of Johnson’s forward movement] is all over him.” 

As with Jackson and Winkeljohn, this advice was spot on. Hume noticed that Johnson’s circular, in-and-out movement was giving Dodson too many opportunities to land his potent left hand. When Johnson came straight in and pressured him, however, Dodson had few answers. The resulting clinch exchanges, Hume noted, were all in Johnson’s favor.

The response was to move straight in behind the right hand and right high kick, with the clinch to follow. Lo and behold, Johnson did exactly that for the next four rounds and won a dominant decision.

In both cases, what’s even more striking than the advice is the fact that both Jones and Johnson went out and applied it perfectly in the following round. Coaches can talk all they want, but having fighters who listen—note Johnson’s verbal acknowledgment above—and respond properly is something else entirely.

Both Jones and Johnson read their opponents over the course of the round and adjust on the fly, but they’re also well coached and know how to make the larger between-round adjustments as well.

Exceptional conditioning is a necessary prerequisite for fighters who build to a late-round crescendo like Jones and Johnson, and both have it, but their commitment to attrition enhances whatever edge in cardio they might have. Constant targeting of the legs and especially the body wears the opponent down.

Against Cormier, Jones landed 15 kicks to the leg and 34 to the body, many of them devastating knees. No matter how well-conditioned Cormier was, that’s just too many to take. The Gustafsson fight is another example: We focus on the brilliant spinning elbow as the turning point, but the 39 leg kicks and 23 body shots Jones landed through the first three rounds had Gustafsson limping and gasping.

Johnson’s tendency toward attrition is less pronounced but still noticeable. Knees to the body in the clinch are his specialty, especially early. He piled up 23 body shots in the Dodson rematch, 31 against Kyoji Horiguchi, 33 in his first fight with Joseph Benavidez and a staggering 41 against Ali Bagautinov. 

Even more so than body or leg strikes, Johnson’s constant pressure, willingness to grind in the clinch and the effort he forces his opponents to exert just to keep up with him wears them down. It’s mentally exhausting.

Aside from the fifth round against Dominick Cruz, which was still competitive, Johnson has never lost the final frame. He has finished two opponents, Horiguchi and John Moraga, in the final five minutes. Jones’ sample size is smaller, but he too has never lost the fifth or even the fourth round. Like Johnson, he has two finishes in the championship rounds.

Despite the vast differences in their physical dimensions, MMA’s two best pound-for-pound fighters share this remarkable similarity in common.

Their games layer from minute to minute and round to round, and everything the opponent does becomes a piece of information for their supercomputer fighting minds to process, analyze and respond to. Smart coaches, excellent conditioning and a commitment to attrition all work together to create fighters who are unbeatable when the going gets tough.

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 and Facebook.

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