Cody Garbrandt vs. Rob Font: Form And Function
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While MMA’s bantamweight division has been one of the very best in the sport for quite a long time at this point, it has also grown to be defined by a championship as pitifully confused as a piece of jewelry can be. Essentially every single unfortunate event that could happen to a lineage has happened to the UFC belt at 135 — an injury-prone champion for years, a longstanding interim belt, a controversial decision that left the loser playing the role of a champion more responsibly than the man who won, and that only brings the cursed tale to 2016. While there are divisions that essentially bar entry to the top-15 (lightweight) or top-5 (featherweight), neither is as obviously frustrating as the 135 belt never quite finding where it’s supposed to be — and the last time the UFC looked to unify the deserving champion with the beltholder in Petr Yan vs. Aljamain Sterling, the fight just ended up switching their positions.
All this is to say, bantamweight is not an open division at the top. The persistent oddness of every championship-related outcome has created a defined queue for the shot at Sterling that likely won’t be resolved in the next year — Yan, Sandhagen, Dillashaw perhaps. This leaves a fight like Rob Font vs. Cody Garbrandt — on paper the #3 at 135 against the #4 — not as relevant to the title scene as perhaps it should be; beating a man in their positions would be enormously significant in a normal division, but it is all but certain that the winner won’t see that benefit. Considering the fairly fortuitous rises both had to their current positions, this isn’t a completely terrible thing, but it does mean the fight relies on intrigue that comes entirely from the matchup and not the consequences. Luckily, there’s plenty — in terms of betting on the fight, Cody Garbrandt is even money on most books, with Rob Font a slight favorite at -121.
The closeness on the odds is completely justified, as both men pose interesting queries to one another — while neither is the best boxer in their division, both could accurately be described as two of the more boxing-reliant, and certainly two of the bigger pure punchers at the weight. Neither has looked completely prepared to address the thin margins represented by the other, leaving it a fight that could hinge on athleticism or durability or speed just as easily as it could be decided by offensive craft. On May 22nd, one of MMA’s most shocking glass cannons — and one of the greatest beneficiaries of bantamweight’s mad championship scramble — looks to turn back a thumping bruiser who seems to have just found his stride.
Cody No Love
In the UFC since the pre-Reebok era, winning a championship, and going on a bad skid — essentially the entire career arc of a UFC contractor, and usually a large-enough sample size to really gauge a fighter — Cody Garbrandt is still often seen as an enigmatic figure at 135. The consensus seems to be that he’s a bit of a quasi-elite — perhaps very dangerous and tough for the top of the division but not always, and one who can lose to fighters ranked far lower but only sometimes. Garbrandt’s curious position as Schrodinger’s title contender comes down to a few things — a truncated path to the top of 135, a moment-reliant skillset that doesn’t really have many analogs at lower-weights, and a performance against Dominick Cruz that seemingly made both of the prior concerns completely inconsequential.
The approach Garbrandt had in the Cruz fight is one that can be compared, in some respects, to his most recent bout against Raphael Assuncao; as unfortunately declined as the legendary Brazilian was, he still posed different challenges to Garbrandt that showed how truly similar the Cruz fight was to Garbrandt’s other showings. However, neither fight is the best place to start with Garbrandt — to show what Garbrandt does by default, it’s probably most useful to look at his performances where he had the greatest athletic edges.
Garbrandt at his best is a ferocious combination-counterpuncher — he’s terrific at timing his opponent’s committed entries into the pocket, where he’s never throwing less than two or three big hooks before they can bail out. In several instances, Brimage can’t even feint punches by selling them with his feet without Garbrandt on him as soon as he does.
The big staple of Garbrandt is that once an opponent shows up in his range, he’s relentless. He’s completely willing to sit on the inside and alternate hooks until someone is dead or has left, even if he’s starting from a bad position (like the kick recovery). Being blazing fast of hand and incredibly powerful helps that, but the way his shot selection usually goes overhand-hook-hook-hook-hook has some drawbacks seen later — having a good rear hook to use on the inside is rare enough that it does often shock people, that said.
On the lead, Garbrandt has shown some cleverness on the offensive side; not much variety as seen earlier, but against the slow-starting Thomas Almeida, Garbrandt shifting to the outside of Almeida’s lead foot herded him into the left hook, forcing him into the fence for the finish. And it bears mention once again, he hits very hard, and he’s quick enough that his blitzes don’t always need a great deal of setup to be more successful than they should be.
With this fairly simple but potent pocket-oriented game, Garbrandt made it to a fight against Dominick Cruz — and this is where the second layer of Garbrandt’s advantage reveals itself. Garbrandt was certainly a faster and stronger puncher than Cruz, but his other edge is mechanical, and this is where the notion of Garbrandt as the top boxer at 135 comes from. Garbrandt is terrific as a mechanical puncher, and his weight transfer combined with a great deal of natural power tends to mean that he doesn’t need huge connections for massive results; Garbrandt’s confidence in his raw potency is well-founded, and it was especially well-founded in exchanges with Cruz.
When Cruz was floating around on the outside, Garbrandt attacked with a simple but quite decent kicking game to get Cruz to close distance — and the defensive wrestling of Garbrandt (largely via the front headlock) was incredibly diligent, forcing Cruz to face him on his terrain.
Again, Garbrandt’s insane potency in even-exchanges at close range — Cruz is the sort of opponent whose positioning and punching mechanics don’t really facilitate extended exchanging, a lot of his game relies on tricky shifts and angling away, and the tighter shots of a Garbrandt who remained in his stance were enough to win the trades that happened. Worth noting, though, Garbrandt isn’t really doing anything defensive during these trades himself — here, he didn’t really need to, but even Garbrandt’s best showing saw Cruz draw out his flurry at long range and duck beneath the counters to drop him.
One of Garbrandt’s more interesting skills in this fight was how he was able to track the exits of Cruz — cutting off his routes with his feet, similar to what he did with Almeida, but on the counter as Cruz looked to exit to Cody’s rear side. Instead of turning to face, which is what Cruz opponents usually did, Garbrandt would step through into southpaw as Cruz left, trapping him with a deep outside angle that shortened the rear hand.
Cruz’s response to the kicking of Garbrandt was to chase Cody, looking to initiate exchanges where there was no longer an endgame for him when he got them; the wrestling was right out, and winning those exchanges consistently would require skills that Cruz didn’t have in the face of a massive mechanical disparity. In contrast, Raphael Assuncao simply stood at range and kicked back — and this led to a fairly slow affair with an explosive finish, one that pointed to a calmer and more methodical Garbrandt to some but also a fight that didn’t allow Cody his strongest areas until the very end.
Much of Garbrandt/Assuncao looked exactly like this — both men floating around kicking each other, neither confident enough in their leads to deal with the other man’s counters. Assuncao did start dealing with the Garbrandt kicks by drawing his leg back, but both men fought very conservatively for most of the fight.
The counter threat of Assuncao seemed to somewhat mute the punching volume of Garbrandt — where the Brazilian could quite reliably deal with Garbrandt’s attempts to cover the distance that he had set. Beating Assuncao on the lead generally requires a bit of craft in drawing out his responses before slotting in offense, or at least dulling his trigger before stepping in; while Garbrandt’s blitzes could be devastatingly effective, he didn’t do much to make it a safe approach, and Garbrandt’s rare one-off jab didn’t really serve as free volume either. Garbrandt ultimately won this fight, but insofar as looking different, the distance and counters of Assuncao did far more to force that than any additional discipline on Garbrandt’s part.
Garbrandt’s wild pocket game comes with its own risks — the sort which both Dillashaw and Munhoz exploited thoroughly, one with clever angle-taking and the other with proactive defense as he threw — but the largest question that hasn’t been answered to its full potential with Garbrandt is a corollary to the way the Assuncao fight went. Garbrandt’s game at range is entirely a stopgap until he gets into the pocket, and yet enforcing the pocket himself is something that Garbrandt struggles to do safely — so what if there’s a fighter who can set up outside the range of Garbrandt and safely lead with longer volume? The hooking counters of Garbrandt are effective at close range, and someone looking to enter behind the jab with their feet can still get shocked by his favored combination —
— but much of Dominick Cruz’s limited success came from treating the jab as an end and not as a means. Cruz remaining at range and not giving Garbrandt the committed entry he needed led to a very surprising amount of success dealing with Garbrandt.
Garbrandt’s defense to Cruz’s wilder flurries became the stuff of legend afterwards, leaving that swaggering competence in stark contrast to his response to jabs through the entire fight. At worst, Garbrandt just stared at the strike and didn’t bother to really do anything about it — and at best, Garbrandt defended the strike, but with no real counter options if Cruz remained at the end of it, leaving his most potent role in a fight very prone to being limited.
Cody wanting to lace people with close-range combinations while they sit in the pocket means that his game is best tuned to meeting committed entries — these sometimes turned into cross-counters, as seen in the earlier Cruz exchanges, but the specific-punch-counter is incidental to Garbrandt throwing the overhand as his opponent steps in. When the step-in isn’t there, the counters often aren’t either — so someone being able to play with entry feints and throwaways at long range would be a challenge to his triggers on the counter, the way TJ Dillashaw was.
The intrigue of Garbrandt against elite bantamweights is still a bit of a question mark; for one, he has two wins over elites at any point, but a perpetually-injured Cruz wouldn’t win again for about four years, and Assuncao was so clearly over-the-hill in their fight that he barely resembled the man who’d turned away prospect after prospect years earlier. Despite being a former champion, there’s a great deal for ‘No Love’ to prove, and Rob Font is a demonstrably tough test.
Impact, 72 Pt
Despite passing similarities, Rob Font’s style beyond ‘boxer in MMA’ differs heavily from that of the former champion. Compared to Garbrandt’s preference to sit on the counter, with his game on the outside looking to draw his opponent into the fire, Rob Font pushes the fire upon his opponent — the Bostonian’s default mode is ‘forward’, and he’s much more comfortable dictating the action than having to respond to an opponent doing the same. Where Garbrandt’s impressive moments are most often a function of athletic or mechanical edges, Font’s game is one that builds on itself tactically — Garbrandt’s moments of lethal fury in the pocket are mostly disconnected from one another, where Font’s game at range is at least superficially designed to set up his game in-close. Garbrandt’s fierce loyalty to the Team Alpha Male megacamp contrasts heavily to ‘The New England Cartel’, really just a name for Font and his similarly-successful teammate Calvin Kattar — but even in opposition to the measured combinations and defensive depth of the featherweight, Rob Font at his best is a swarming offensive machine.
The place to start with Font is always going to be his reliance on his jab; this is a trait common in his team that can be exploited by the right sort of fighter, but also completely justified by its tremendous utility. In fact, the difference in philosophy between Font and Garbrandt is captured well in their relationships with the jab — one of the earliest quirks pointed out with Garbrandt’s game was how his mechanical soundness translated to a very fast and accurate but sparsely-used one, where Font’s jab is nothing if not constant.
Rob Font has had a lot of very jabby performances, and so it says something that his dominant win over current Bellator bantamweight champion Sergio Pettis was the jabbiest of them all. In terms of using the jab as an independent weapon, Font’s steady and lancing lead hand jolted the shorter Pettis with alarming regularity right at the very end of his long range — while his rhythm wasn’t too variable here and that could easily be a problem, the Pettis fight also showed to some extent the way Font can build on his game. As Pettis started to look to parry the straight shot, Font started to feint them out and loop the left hand around the parry, and Font’s bodywork off his rear hand found Pettis just as reliably as the jab.
In fact, the setup function of the jab is far more interesting than the jab just being really bruising when Rob throws it really hard — when Font does decide to vary the rhythm of his lead hand, it’s often to push his opponent into positions where they can’t further defend the rear hand. Getting Ricky Simon ducking into an uppercut is the obvious one, but the trajectory of his straight is often informed by his opponent slipping or weaving in response to the jab. This is the Kattar School of jabbing at its most classical — for instance, the way Almeida’s consistent slipping of the slower power-jab in the first round was turned against him by Font throwing away the jab and cutting across the path of Almeida’s reset with his rear hand.
Against the power-punching brawler Douglas Silva de Andrade, Font’s jab didn’t just draw out defensive reactions but offensives — and Font played with the trigger on de Andrade’s counters all night from just outside of his effective range. Entry feints and noncommittal jabs forced de Andrade to be incredibly reactive to anything Font showed, and Font did a great job punishing it — here, Font did it with kicks, but many of the exchanges were just de Andrade walking into real jabs looking to blitz on the fake jab.
Left to his own devices, Font seems to think of his jab as a power shot — which has interesting consequences, and the Marlon Moraes knockout only scratches that surface. Invoking the comparison to Calvin Kattar, Font isn’t nearly as disciplined defensively off his own jab — and that’s often a consequence of the heaviness he often affords the punch, where trying to send his lead hand through the skull of Almeida got him countered up through the first — but a sort of pawing, sticky jab does have its function in a way that a Garbrandtian jab doesn’t. Font isn’t the deepest clinchfighter out there, but the way in which his jab often turns into a grab gives him some advantages in this sense — and has led to some of his stronger offensive moments.
Against Simon and (especially) Silva de Andrade, Font did some good work turning his jab into the collar tie — when his opponent looks to slip inside the jab, Font can draw it out and line up the tie, or just go directly from the slipped jab into it. At the very least, this sort of entry advantage gives Font free shots from the tie in ways that he probably won’t get in more conventional clinch-battles — and by the end of the DSDA fight, Font was really mauling him from the double-collar tie every time he got it. Not quite Petr Yan, but striking into the clinch is always a nice thing to see.
On Almeida’s outside slips, on the other hand, Font’s lead hand often shot out as a frame — letting him line up the uppercut and the elbow over the top, stifling Almeida offensively, and leading him into the clinch proper. Font’s handsy and physical style on the inside makes him an absolute handful on the fence, and the finish came with Almeida slipping outside Font’s rear hand — only for that to also become a frame and shove him into a head kick.
Separated from his jab, Rob Font doesn’t make much sense — less sense than his teammate, who at least has a couple strong performances where he leaned more on his counterpunching than his jab (Fili and Ige). This could very easily come down to the way that Font often looks to take advantage of his opponent reacting to the jab; whereas everything from Kattar as a jab follow-up comes directly from his stance, Font is a lot more prone to drop it entirely — blitzing in leads to some clean-looking flurries when he can draw out a reaction or feel his way in, but defaulting to the same sort of attack when his opponent isn’t responding to anything is a lot more dangerous.
Font’s blitzes seem to happen most often against static guards, where his long looping right hand leads into big combinations. This sort of wide/narrow switchup was largely how he torched Marlon Moraes — Moraes quickly realized that he couldn’t deal with the speed of the jab as it came and started accounting for it with a high-guard, only for Font to start attacking the gaps with the overhand and uppercut. Dsepite being effective, marching blitzes have their obvious drawback — Font’s positional looseness in those exchanges easily could’ve gone worse than they did, even against Moraes’ left hook counter.
Font hasn’t lost enough to take away too many massive trends, but both Raphael Assuncao and John Lineker did it by taking away the distance that Font needs to be the slick ranger; where Lineker kicked Font for jabbing and pressured hard beyond the jab to leave Font skating along the side of the cage, Assuncao (then in good form) shortchanged the jab with his meticulous distance and forced Font into covering distance more messily.
In one of the craftier performances in MMA, Assuncao really forced Font to cover distance a bit more recklessly than he prefers; Assuncao catching the jab and his measured retreats meant that Font couldn’t really get the right distance on the right hand, and Assuncao interrupted him with his counterpunching (and eventually with takedowns) as Font started to commit to leaping in on Assuncao as he backed off. As the longer fighter most of the time, it’s not common to see Font struggling so much to reach his opponent — but Assuncao’s keen control of the distance made it work.
Font likely isn’t different now than he was when Assuncao deconstructed him; he’s not the youngest fighter out there, and in fact settled soundly into the role of being a gatekeeper for the real elites before defeating a contender in Moraes who probably isn’t elite anymore. However, he’s also built a quite solid resume at the mid-level of a brilliant division, and this has been more than enough to consider him in a broadly positive light — as a tactically nuanced and durable puncher who can mostly create the situations that favor him. Where Garbrandt is a good deal more nimble on the inside with his feet than Font, that’s a range that Font can conceivably completely avoid — and in terms of diversity of attack and effective range, Font should come out on top as the minute-winner, if nothing else.
In Sum
Garbrandt/Font is a quite curious fight. Both are more likely top-10 than top-5, with the obvious omission from the top-5 being Pedro Munhoz — who finished both of them within a round — but there’s also a decent chance that either could be dangerous for fighters a lot cleaner and a lot deeper than both. This is far truer for Cody Garbrandt, a bigger moment-to-moment threat than Font who could turn any fight on a dime, but Garbrandt’s limits are more defined than those of Font; if one of them is going to look like a true elite at any point moving forward, Font’s game seems better-equipped. More realistically, the winner will likely be the best of the rest, the same position that the New England Cartel inhabits at featherweight — very tough to beat for anyone outside of immediate title contention, but also not a real title threat, which is a perfectly respectable position in divisions where mobility is nearly impossible.
As to who should win this fight, the way that the liabilities of both men match up with the strengths of the other is something to behold. Garbrandt not having a consistent response to a longer jabber is a particular point of concern against an opponent who is an absolute certainty to jab liberally throughout a fight, but whether Font will be able to simply sit at range without pressing the issue is an open question (considering that Garbrandt didn’t give Cruz the responses that Font would want to build off landing the jab — he just backed away, and Font could feel the need to hunt him down for it). Similarly, Font’s not much of a counterpuncher, which makes Garbrandt’s own blitzes on the lead an interesting proposition — but he’s also not a complete non-entity on the counter, and Garbrandt’s committed enough to his blitzes on the counter that even a backstepping jab could jolt him as he bites on a feint. Garbrandt’s kicking game could easily give Font’s deep and low stance some issues, but it also isn’t a particularly deep kicking game —and Garbrandt’s capability in the sort of striking-clinch situations that Font reliably creates is one of the few true unknowns about him. It’s an incredibly compelling fight that’s perched on the edge of utter chaos at all times.
Ultimately, it seems like the onus is on Garbrandt to solve Font and not the other way around — both Font and Garbrandt fighting to their strengths seems to suggest a range fight where Font gets his jab and Garbrandt has to find novel ways to deal with it, whereas a classical Garbrandt win essentially requires Font to be a bit overaggressive. In any case, despite being Rob Font’s fight to lose (and the books tend to agree), many consistent fighters have done just that against the violence of bantamweight’s premier bomber.