Josh Emmett vs. Shane Burgos: Smashing A Cyclone
Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC
In every sense, Shane Burgos vs. Josh Emmett seemed to be a battle of opposites.
Going into the fight, one could argue most of the intrigue was due to exactly that fact; Emmett and Burgos not only seemed to be headed in opposite directions as fighters, they seemed to stand in philosophical opposition to one another, technically and narratively.
For Shane Burgos, the fight was a fairly regular one, an expected step into top-10 foes, even if it was an obviously dangerous step. The surprising part was that Burgos was by far the more known quantity in the matchup, and he was the more trusted one as a blue-corner favorite; in fact, Burgos had entered every one of his UFC bouts as a favorite on the books, and even his sole losing performance (in one of the best fights ever, against current #6 featherweight Calvin Kattar) hadn’t done much to discourage his rise as a top prospect. Burgos’ appeal as a striker came partly from his defensive-comfort (even if it didn’t always get the appreciation it deserved) and partly from his counterpunching, but above all, it came from his dedication to attrition work like few else. His previous fight started slow from him, but by the end, Burgos had put Makwan Amirkhani through one of the most sickening body-assaults in recent memory. In general (excluding the Holobaugh fight), every Burgos win has felt downright inevitable, in that running them back 10 times would only result in 10 more nasty beatings.
Josh Emmett not only worked in a different way, there was question as to whether he truly worked at all. Since his bout against Ricardo Lamas as a short-notice fill-in, Emmett hadn’t been the favorite in any of his fights, and considering how much of his success seemed contained to brief moments of unparalleled danger, it wasn’t unwarranted. With his loss to Jeremy Stephens, Emmett seemed stuck in the mold of a classic Team-Alpha-Male fighter, a bit like a new-age Faber; a terrific athlete, hard to wrestle, with a striking game that wasn’t deep but didn’t allow a single mistake. Emmett’s spot since that fight seemed to be defined by both the public and the promotion; he was a test for the ones who really had a shot to do big things, but even when he wiped out a super-prospect like Mirsad Bektic with a jab, he was in a holding pattern. Not quite a rising prospect, not quite a true contender, just waiting to be solved by the UFC’s next big thing, in a way that was just a bit more diligent than the way that Michael Johnson did (before one of those moments flattened him).
At 35 and with a catastrophic injury behind him, Emmett couldn’t afford a holding pattern any longer, and he fought like it; Emmett vs. Burgos violently spelled massive things regarding both men. In one of the best fights that featherweight has ever seen, Josh Emmett made a convincing case to be taken seriously as a contender, and to be given a top-5 opponent. For his part, Shane Burgos won many of the minutes and hung with Emmett at nearly every step, proving that (while he needed development) the hopes that many had for him were far from wasted. In the battle between the puncher and the boxer, the puncher won, but only after introducing a bit of science into his approach that he hadn’t ever shown before.
R1: The Expected Dynamic
As usual, Shane Burgos took the front foot, and Josh Emmett took the back; Burgos has always been a forward-moving counterpuncher, the kind to panic an opponent into swinging and punish them for it, where Emmett’s game has generally benefitted from walking his man onto his big bursts (as he did to Michael Johnson for the finish). The directionality of the fight remained the same throughout, but Emmett couldn’t find many early clean blows despite Burgos being the one giving chase; Burgos’ defence in the pocket wasn’t perfect by any means, but Emmett’s predictability proved a serious issue. Burgos was playing with fire with his strategic approach, playing in the pocket as the longer man against a puncher who could put out an elephant, but he seemed to have that fire mostly under control (albeit with a little help from one of Emmett’s knees betraying him).
There was a lot of conventional blocking from Shane, but the most visually impressive moments of defence from Burgos were his “riding” of the right hand, often so subtle that it seemed to just be a big shot that turned his head around; when he saw Emmett’s shots coming, Burgos could just turn his head with it, and come out clean. This is something that Burgos often did against fighters like Tiago Trator early in his UFC run, but managing those thin margins with a puncher like Emmett is something else altogether.
Much of Burgos’ offense in round 1, in fact, was as a response to Emmett’s big right, as well as his predictable distance-covering. Shane got to counter-kicking both the jab and the right-hand right away, and for someone who sits on their rear hand as hard as Emmett does, those can be absolutely debilitating; Burgos’ kicking game targeted Emmett’s leg at its most vulnerable, rooted to the floor with all of his weight on it. There’s a reason they so often knocked Josh out of stance or off-balance, even as they were (in isolation) not the hardest kicks in the world.
This sequence shows the mind of “Hurricane” Shane at work. Emmett covers distance with the jab and throws an overhand that sneaks behind Shane’s lead hand. He tries the same combination again, on the same rhythm, and Shane slips outside the right. The third time, Emmett changes his target with the right to aim at the body, but is throwing the combo on the same rhythm, and Burgos intercepts him with a clean body-kick off his lead leg. Emmett wasn’t doing anything complex here, but it took Burgos a single instance of the exchange to figure out how not to get hit by the shot, and one more to figure out how to punish it.
Where Emmett found success was on the counter, at least early. In the past, Emmett’s counterpunching has really only been a threat to opponents who were doing fairly unsound chasing, such as Jeremy Stephens’ patented technique of running the man back to the fence, and then throwing an uppercut from the floor; however, even in the face of Burgos trying to work with straight punches and kicks, Emmett managed to keep him honest, countering in combination to catch Burgos leaving the exchange. These were likely the biggest singular blows of the round, as Burgos worked for volume more than power and couldn’t roll with shots as well in the middle of messier exchanges.
Where Burgos succeeded on the lead was with his jab and his left hook, particularly on the counter but also as a way to set up his biggest shot of the round in a nice left hook to the body. Burgos’ length isn’t something he uses as consistently as he probably should, at least in a matchup like Emmett, and the moments where he showed a bit of conservatism paid off handsomely. Early in round 2, the same detail manifested.
R2: The Eyewall
Round 1 was a close round, if on optics alone; Burgos had the cleaner work by far, and had the volume, but Emmett had absolutely massive bursts that thudded against Burgos’ guard and seemed to be an inch away from putting him down. In round 2, Burgos seemed to have an idea on how to take Emmett’s success away a bit more, even though he couldn’t remain completely insulated.
Burgos seemed to figure out that he could handle Emmett’s leads in this round, at least insofar as not getting caught by surprise; his concern was Emmett’s counterpunching, and he handled it by just continuing to jab. Not only did Emmett not have consistent defensive answers to the jab, he also couldn’t find counters if Burgos simply attacked from his stance and enforced a longer distance than that of Emmett’s hooks; even when Emmett could counter the jab, Burgos remaining in his stance meant that he could put up a guard or roll with it (or even sholder-roll it, once) by the time Emmett covered the requisite distance.
What Emmett used as the cue for his counterpunching was Burgos’ rear-hand, and near the beginning of the round, he showed exactly why he was so dangerous; Burgos didn’t defend proactively off his right hand, he mostly just wound it back upright, so Emmett timing Burgos as he leaned over his feet meant that he had a window in which Burgos didn’t have his feet in the right place to be slick. The jab kept Burgos in his stance, in a position where he could keep seeing and reacting to what Emmett brought back, but trying to sit on his rear-hand took that away, so Emmett’s counterpunching found the mark. The fact that the mechanics of his exit were so messy (just backing out straight and squaring up) meant that Emmett’s entire counter-combination landed.
If Burgos was to safely use his right hand, it had to be concealed well, or he had to be proactive in dealing with the big overhand counters. Burgos did both; early in round 2, he used a right to drop Emmett into a lead uppercut, but it was near the end of the round that Burgos started to carve the Californian up a bit, actually getting Emmett to react to his jab (with things like deep committed ducks) before lacing him with straights as he wasn’t in a position to just leap forward.
Round 2 was Burgos’ best of the fight, and it seemed that Emmett was losing his handle on the bout a bit; Shane’s quick jab either caught him clean or didn’t give him the opening he needed, and Burgos had tightened up his selection of what he actually sat down on. If Emmett continued to wait on the counter, it would be incredibly difficult for him, unless Burgos simply made a huge mistake out of character. However, Emmett did have a moment upon which he seemed to build, what seemed to be the first clean right he landed on the lead in ages:
Emmett changes levels to apparently look for a second takedown (the first one failed at the end of round 1). This time he comes back up after touching Burgos’ leg, with a right hand that catches Burgos clean. The Mendes gambit.
So going into the final frame, just as Burgos thought he had the answers, Emmett changed the questions.
R3: The Ghost Of Bang
Before the fight, Emmett was not thought to be the adaptive fighter in the equation. He had the third-round knockout a couple fights prior, but that was more an effect of facing a man who was constitutionally incapable of consistent performances at that stage in his career, where Burgos was one known for building on his successes until the finish was all-but-certain. However, what Emmett proved against Burgos, above all else, was that he was more of a problem-solver than he got credit for; when the fight slipped away on the counter and remained inaccessible on the lead with his usual approach, Emmett introduced a couple subtleties that made all the difference.
Even early in the round, before the knockdowns, Emmett had success on the lead that he hadn’t before, and that was a function of him entering off bodywork; the right that he landed in round 2 was off a level-change, and while he couldn’t take Burgos down, entering with bodyshots and working to the head served the same level-varying purpose. Burgos is very good defensively to his head (with a caveat seen later), he’s tough to hit clean, but getting Burgos biting on the level-change made Emmett’s threat far harder to read. Later in the round, Emmett just jabbed into his overhand, same as before, but the previous bodywork meant that Burgos was far less prepared to deal with that than he was a round prior (when even Emmett dropping down was just a cue to protect the left side of his face).
What got Emmett the knockdowns, however, was his stance switch, even though his game from southpaw is no deeper (or even really different) than it is from orthodox. The aforementioned caveat is that Burgos’ defence is less “specific responses to everything” and more “responding specifically to what he expects”; defensively, Burgos needs reads. This is why Emmett struggled so much early, without being a deep offensive boxer himself; his consequential attacks were largely all the same things, and Burgos worked out multiple answers very quickly, so there wasn’t a way for him to consistently find Shane cleanly. But as Burgos got comfortable doing that, Emmett threw a wrench in it, and that caught Shane bare.
What helped Emmett in that sense was that he hid his stance-switches very well, and didn’t overstay his welcome in southpaw; Burgos had next to no reads for a southpaw Emmett, Emmett simply didn’t give him the opportunity, and he also didn’t have the opportunity to play it safer upon realizing that Emmett had changed something. Emmett spent much of the fight on the outside, moving laterally in a square stance, and he broke into southpaw with massive left-hands that devastated the New Yorker. Even that didn’t work more than twice, but it didn’t need to. As crafty as Burgos has looked as a defensive fighter, craft has a limit.
As Burgos looked to make up the obvious third-round deficit in the final two minutes, it only made Emmett’s job easier en route to a clear 10-8 (if not wider). The recklessness of Burgos took away any defensive polish he still had (off getting nearly finished twice), and Emmett started doing things like counter-jabbing and doubling on counter right hands and winning extended exchanges in a way he certainly wasn’t prior. With complex body-head combinations and stance switches used so intentionally, Emmett went from resembling a Team Alpha Male fighter to looking like he was training under Duane Ludwig, in the span of a single round; it seemed a bit like he was possessed by the soul of Joseph Benavidez. It was a brilliant adjustment, and it left the fight lopsided on the whole, even if it was closer on rounds.
Concluding Thoughts
Burgos was the best win of Emmett’s career, and there’s an argument that it isn’t particularly close; Burgos is a prospect but he isn’t raw by any means, and will likely age significantly better than veterans such as Lamas and Johnson (or even Bektic, who looks far less viable moving forward than Burgos ever has). More meaningfully, though, Emmett got his first win among the elite that seemed to give an actual gauge of what he does well, as a matter of skills and not attributes. Knocking fighters stiff and dropping them with jabs isn’t common at 145, but without a consistent way to apply such earth-shattering power, it is simply navigable by top fighters; Emmett didn’t seem to have method to his might, and the Johnson fight was won despite facing a demonstrably slicker and more functional boxer, but Burgos brought something out of Emmett that he’d be wise to keep. Given his build and his style, Emmett isn’t a man expected to improve over five rounds, but that’s exactly what it looked like; that leaves him a scary contender, even for opponents who can strand him at range more thoughtfully than Shane Burgos did. With the entire top-5 of 145 seemingly occupied and Calvin Kattar probably first in line for a shot at that tier, Emmett still doesn’t have a place to go for the near future, but he’s definitely earned the right to wait until it clears up.
The other side of it is Shane Burgos, who showed some terrific skills even in a loss, but also showed the holes in his approach that made the fight a bit worrying going into it. Burgos’ issue isn’t one of bad defence by any means, but one of trusting his defence in the pocket more than he should, in matchups where that simply doesn’t make much sense; he’s almost too much of a born fighter to win certain fights. Emmett looked winnable for Burgos if he extended the distance a bit more, and if he were less happy to engage in the pocket in the first round; as is, he went to what likely should’ve been a draw, but lost on a round that hinged on optics more than anything else. It’s a question of focus for Burgos, one that would be encouraging (if a bit less entertaining) to see fixed in a matchup that’s less dangerous, someone like Dan Ige or Arnold Allen. He’s very promising nevertheless, at the very least as a high-level action fighter who can put contenders through hell whether they win or lose, but even that is a bit of a disappointment given how deep his skills seem to run. If the pure damage of the fight didn’t ruin him, “Hurricane” Shane is still one to watch, and both of the men to beat him have walked through fire to earn it.