UFC 202 odds and gambling strategy guide

It’s fight night and so we are back again with another gambling preview of the fights, the odds, and my own personal breakdown of where the value lies. Fights with debuting fighters get less in depth analysis because stats aren’t available and same goes for fighters with only a couple of UFC bouts.

As always, all stats come from FightMetric and all the odds are from Best Fight Odds. Net Value means how much money you would have made if you bet $100 on that fighter in every one of his/her fights that odds could be found for and is calculated using the closing odds for each fight.

Doubly as always, I’m trying to provide the most thorough guide I can for those who want to legally bet or who just enjoy following along. If you are a person who chooses to gamble, only do so legally, responsibly, and at your own risk.

Breakdown

Let’s not bury the lede here: Nate Diaz should in NO WAY be an underdog here. Conor McGregor is a wonderful fighter but Nate Diaz is a stylistic nightmare for him and this fight is going to look very much like their first encounter. For all the excuses and explanations made for that fight, the fact remains that Nate Diaz came in on 10 days notice and summarily whooped Conor McGregor. Now Nate Diaz has had a full fight camp and I expect him to do so again.

First, let’s dispel a couple of prevalent myths surrounding the first fight. McGregor was not killing Diaz in the first round nor was Diaz “close to falling.” McGregor did win the first round but if you re-watch it, he never has Nate seriously in trouble and he is exerting a ton of energy in order to win the round. For every left hand he landed on Diaz, he was catching check hooks on the way in and Nate was rolling Conor’s punches extremely well. Conor did have a lot of success with a rear hand uppercut when Nate would dip his head but his other punches were mostly mitigated by the defensive acumen of Nate. Conor also showed a real difficulty in dealing with an active lead jab from southpaw Diaz and I believe Nate’s chipping away with strikes is just as much to blame for the “loss of energy” from Conor as Conor’s explosive knockout attempts.

Let’s also dispel the myth that Conor McGregor can’t grapple. He was more than adequate in the ground exchanges before getting rocked. Yes, Nate Diaz will have the advantage if the fight goes to the ground but Conor didn’t get tapped because he is bad at BJJ. He was mercy tapped after Nate chewed him up on the feet. I’d also like to say here that McGregor doesn’t get enough credit for the way he fought after he was clearly done. Despite being cooked, McGregor continued to throw and throw accurately, albeit without the pop normally associated with his punches. The ability to no sell being hurt with effective offense is an extremely valuable thing and something worth remembering.

McGregor is a great boxer with elite power at 145 but he has become extremely reliant on his power left hand and the power doesn’t translate fully up to 155, especially against a man like Diaz who has an iron chin. He also suffers tremendously from not enjoy his normal physical advantages, struggling mightily to navigate the range advantage Nate had. I would argue that Conor lost not because he got tired but that he was winning because he was doing things that would exhaust him. In order for Conor to look good, he had to explode to cover distance and connect. In essence, Conor only looked as good as he did because he was sprinting. If you were to enter into a marathon and dead sprint the first 100 yards, you might be in the lead. But to then say, “well I only lost because I got tired” is a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work. You can’t sprint 26 miles and Conor can’t explode into shots for 25 minutes while keeping the volume he does. It just isn’t realistic.

And finally I want to talk about what I view as the real determining factor in making a selection here: inherent style. Fighters develop a style that they are comfortable with and it becomes their gospel. It is exceedingly rare for a fighter to be able to fight against type. Conor’s style as pressure-volume-power puncher isn’t built to succeed against Nate Diaz. In the history of MMA, no one has been successful at fighting the Diaz brothers on their terms, and essentially that is what McGregor’s style is. For McGregor to win he has to fight counter to his natural instincts as a fighter and I don’t believe he will do that.

McGregor could very well win if he employs a disciplined game plan for 5 rounds. He does have the speed advantage over Nate, he has better movement at distance, and he has an underrated kicking game which could prove very effective against Diaz. He would need to stay on the outside and use a lot of leg kicks much like Carlos Condit did against Nick or Michael Johnson did in the first round against Nate. He would also be well served to use his snapping front kick to the midsection of Nate often, both to mitigate the cardio advantage of Diaz and as a way to counter Diaz’s length advantage. The question is, will he be able to do this while Nate is in their jawing at him and when he is landing punches.

And that is the thing, Conor will land punches. Though their styles are actually quite different, the Diaz brothers share the trait that they are there to be hit. And when people start landing on them they feel good and start unloading, not realizing that they aren’t landing cleanly and they are taking just as many good punches in the exchanges. This is essentially what Conor did in the first fight and he got chewed up for it.

Before this week I was actually very conflicted about this fight because I think McGregor is a truly special talent and for all the star power Nate has garnered recently, he is a very exploitable fighter who was, realistically, a mid top-10 lightweight. But after this week I am relatively confident that Diaz is the owner of acres and acres of prime real estate in Conor McGregor’s head. This week Conor has shown a real issue with confronting the fact that Nate genuinely doesn’t care about him. The dirty secret here is that for as much as Conor McGregor says he “doesn’t give a f*ck,” he actually gives lots of them and Nate Diaz truly couldn’t care less.

After his loss to Diaz I was impressed with the introspection and self-awareness of McGregor. But then he started trying to justify his loss more and saying that he will KO Nate in the second round. If he fights in a way that to secure a second round KO over Nate Diaz, this fight will be a carbon copy of their first fight. For Conor to win, he needs to have made a fundamental shift in style and have done so over only a few months of training. For NAte to win, he jsut hsa to be himself. Moreover, even if he does start out with the appropriate strategy, how can anyone feel confident he will stick to that when actually in the cage. Conor flipped out and started throwing Monster energy drinks across a crowded room when Nate walked out of a press conference and chucked a water bottle at him. Do you really think he is going to circle away snap a low kick when Nate is talking shit to him in the middle of a fight? Do you think John Kavanagh will be able to rein Conor in in the corner? I have very little faith in either of those things.

One last thing to consider, there is a moment in round 2 before the end of the fight where McGregor loses. He cracks Nate with his best punch of the night and Nate eats it and then immediately starts jawing at him. In that moment you can almost see the last effort of Conor to finish him, and Nate absorbing it like Sebastian Shaw and then turning it up. Conor McGregor is insanely mentally tough. Nate Diaz is tougher. In a battle of wills, Nate Diaz is going to break him..

Nate Diaz is going to win this fight and there is no world in which he should be a betting underdog.

Breakdown

Anthony Johnson is MMA’s premier knockout artist. In all reality, he is likely the hardest hitter in the entirety of MMA, regardless of weight class. Johnson isn’t just raw power though, he has a good amount of depth to his game. Though primarily an orthodox fighter, Rumble can switch stances and has a good jab from either side as well as using thudding leg kicks to great effect. His willingness to throw combinations mixing punches instead of just ending combinations on kicks show the diligent hours of work under dutch stylist Henri Hooft. Where Rumble excels the most though is his understanding of range and timing. He very …

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