UFC 197 Post-fight Patterns: Good MMA

UFC 197? Remember that? Let’s go back and take a look.

Archetypes

One of the best things about watching MMA is the emergence of different styles and the seemingly-constant paradigm shifts. However, sometimes this can trick us a bit, via the assumption that those who have success are representative of new and potentially exciting trends. Conversely, though, it makes more sense that at this point we can increasingly recognize that there are a series of archetypes which are simply more effective than others. Some fighters are better at using the tools they choose to employ, and some are better athletes than others, but there are some approaches which are Good MMA, and some which are not.

Edson Barboza and Anthony Pettis were both high-octane strikers who racked up high-octane wins. If historically asked who had the better, more stable style, the answer would have been Anthony Pettis at almost every moment… until now. He was physically tougher than Barboza, and more well-rounded, with a dynamic submission game to back up his striking.

Increasingly, though, it becomes apparent that Good MMA is less about being skilled at lots of separate areas of MMA (although that helps), but around making sure the approach is connected through the separate areas and phases which the fighter needs to operate in; and that it’s built of high-percentage and multi-purpose tools.

The knock against Pettis has often been “wrestling defense”, and ever since he lost to Clay Guida it’s been something which dogged him. After he lost a turgid decision to Eddie Alvarez, he said that he’d never be able to train wrestling enough to be able to beat the fighters he was up against in that phase. His level of wrestling was never really the problem, though.

Against Alvarez, for example, it wasn’t stopping the takedowns, It was that he wasn’t doing anything to stop Alvarez from trying them. He had no clinch offense, no takedowns of his own, and he constantly backed into the fence and gave up foot position. Pettis would be forced into a situation when he was waiting to stop takedowns, and his volume was dropping, and (reductively) all Alvarez had to do was to spam TDs until they worked. The wrestling in the end wasn’t the problem, but more that the counter-wrestling was constructed as a singular disconnected wall, and the problem was everything which surrounded it.

Michael Johnson, as a counter-example, is a fraction of the grappler that Pettis is, yet he’s become a far more effective defensive wrestler by simply never letting opponents line up a shot, via tight microsteps on the outside and jamming the opponent with a jab or left hand as they follow. Like Barboza, this was a development which had its growing pains (a selection of grapplers who cracked his movement-based outer layer, then dominated him on the floor or tapped him out) but it’s unquestionably a more stable basic style. It is Good MMA.

Keeping at it

Edson Barboza was always a great kicker, and his weaknesses were in his hands: he was pressured and knocked out by Varner; he was lucky to escape with the wins against Pearson and Castillo, and only won his fight against Njokuani with a last-second wheel kick. The problems were almost always with his boxing, and it seemed that whenever he’d develop it he’d be forced to take a step back again. Against Cerrone he threw excited, whizzing combinations like a kid trying out a bike and zooming downhill with the brakes off, until crashing into a Cerrone jab. Michael Johnson pressured him relentlessly, as did Tony Ferguson. In every fight, crucially, though his footwork and head movement got that little bit tighter, his counters got a little more crisp.

The fear was that it wouldn’t matter, because he was losing, and losing relatively often. Every fighter has a massive reserve of confidence to draw upon, but Barboza is a physical freak; the sort of guy who struggles to find sparring partners who won’t get injured if they train with him. If you have these kind of ridiculous physical gifts you just do not expect to lose. It would be more than forgivable if he retreated from the area where he was struggling, and gave up on the whole “boxing” thing, and just started moving backwards faster and faster in fights to desperately get to the area where he could kick effectively, where he knew he was faster and more athletic than everyone else. Instead he doggedly kept working on his boxing, refusing to back away despite his nominally terrible chin and allergy to pressure.

History and the future

It looked as though both Pettis and Barboza came out ready to counter the other’s kicking offense, and so, in the same way that fights between wrestlers often do, the fight between two kickers became about hands.

Barboza ended up beating up Pettis’ legs towards the close, but the foundations for the win were in what are becoming some of the most important elements for good, high-level MMA as a whole: tight footwork, the jab, and the hook. Barboza has worked on his weakness so diligently that he won the biggest fight of his career by exploiting someone in very similar ways that he himself used to be exploited. That …

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