Filed under: UFC, FanHouse Exclusive
When UFC light heavyweight Jon Jones sits down to watch tape on a future opponent, it is an exercise in excess. In fact, that’s kind of the point. For Jones, there’s no such thing as too much time spent studying the man he’s about to fight.
Take Ryan Bader, for instance. To prepare for their fight at UFC 126 on Super Bowl weekend, Jones has procured tape not only of Bader’s fights, but also his interviews and even a recent fan Q&A session. Now he “can’t watch them enough.” As he told MMA Fighting recently, he already feels like he knows what’s going on inside of Bader’s head.
“When you watch someone’s interviews, you can tell where they’re at mentally,” said Jones. “There’s certain words people use, keywords that show their level of confidence. Like, if I win this fight. Or, I hope. I might be able to do this. For instance, when [Bader] says, ‘When Jon does that spinning back elbow he has his back open for a split second and maybe I can take his back.’ Just the fact that he mentioned that in a Q&A tells me that’s on his mind and that’s a move that frustrates him, that’s bothering him, so I should work on it and make it even faster and harder for him to see coming. People give a lot away in everything they say.”
As 
When you’re trying to rank MMA fighters, it’s easy to say you’ll just rank them based on who they’ve beaten and who they’ve lost to inside the cage. It’s a lot harder to actually create the rankings when you realize that it’s mathematically impossible to rank every fighter ahead of the guys he’s beaten and behind the guys who have beaten him.