Rob Font: They Call It Murder
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
An elite action fighter isn’t often an elite action fighter.
One of the great tragedies of a division as fast-moving and violent as 135 is that a fighter often only breaks through as an elite and gets top fights when their time as an elite is nearly at an end; the bottom of the division is too crowded with genuinely promising fighters to distinguish oneself, and there’s almost no margin for error in climbing to contention. It’s a division that ostensibly demands that a fighter be a fully developed and finished product by the time they break into the top-15 — because from that point forward, the competition isn’t just athletic and skilled, but varied and crafty in ways that almost guarantee a decisive loss (unless the fighter in question is among the most versatile ever to compete). In a sense, the totally unforgiving nature of 135 leads to an elite class that isn’t insurmountably flawless, just unreasonably resilient — where everyone in the top-5 had sustained a hard loss or two in the UFC, and just built back to keep themselves in position to benefit from 135’s volatility instead of just getting crushed by it. In fact, as soon as a fighter in Petr Yan seemed to make an unprecedented direct beeline to the belt, the aftermath proved that such a path was rare for good reasons — as Aljamain Sterling showed him the benefit of consistently clever approaches and big-picture shrewdness, the kinds of lessons that a young fighter almost exclusively learns from hard losses to cunning veterans while they still have the time.
In that sense, a rocky path to contention is a bit of a double-edged sword — when a future elite is young, losing to the very best is far from a problem, but a fighter can also go from that future elite to a total bust in the blink of an eye. For every Cory Sandhagen — a fighter who got turned back a few times in #1 contender fights, but had the youth and the growing room to come back sharper and more cultured for each run — there’s a Raoni Barcelos, who simply never had the time to learn how to pair truly elite skills with the strategic undercurrent of a top bantamweight contender. Rob Font seemed to carefully tread this line until late 2020 — the Bostonian very clearly developed into an elite bantamweight well before he was acknowledged as one, but was also likely to run up against the clock before he could get a fair shake at the best when he was truly ready for it. Nevertheless, as his opposition became clearly elite, the Puerto Rican quietly turned into a fighter who wasn’t just tactically brilliant, but whose tactics dovetailed with a hyper-aggressive style like few else. While the risks of his approach revealed themselves, even Font’s losses were among the most spirited in MMA — and in wins, Font has routinely turned in some of the most dazzling performances one will find.
I — The Sniper
Rob Font’s style is likely best-explained relative to the other elite fighter at his camp, the “New England Cartel” — while Font has spent more time in the UFC, he and featherweight Calvin Kattar found similar successes at about the same time, with approaches that are (at least superficially) extremely close to the other’s. The rarity of this kind of camp is hard to overstate, in itself; most high-level camps such as Sanford or ATT largely tend to play the numbers a bit to end up with real elites, and even smaller ones usually have quite a hard drop-off in terms of imparting similar styles into more than one fighter. While the Massachusetts-based NEC doesn’t quite have the consistency of Nova União (who successfully turned both Renan Barao and Jussier Formiga elite with recognizable parts from the style of Jose Aldo), the range-games of their two best pupils show very similar emphases - a kind of ringcraft-agnosticism on one hand, but also an extremely granular jab and a fantastic eye for boxing tactics, as well as a very keen sense for when that jab pushes an opponent out of position.
This quality of both was on full display at UFC 220, an event very appropriately held in Boston; both Font and Kattar went in as underdogs against hyper-aggressive marauders who made their money pushing into the fire and combination-punching in longer exchanges, and both of them came out with knockout wins. On Kattar’s part, his bout with Shane Burgos still stands as one of the most underrated fights of all time — where for Font, Brazilian contender Thomas Almeida started strong but quickly became a stage for an absolutely textbook performance on the utility of the jab at a high level.
Font/Almeida is a very curious fight in which Font provides examples of both a somewhat poor jab and a stellar one in the exact same fight, just a few minutes apart. To start the fight, Font came out with spearing jabs on a predictable rhythm — he feinted forward behind his lead hand, but the jab itself was always massively committed, and it meant his feints and his true entries weren’t terribly difficult for Almeida to distinguish between. The counter inside leg-kick found Font a few times, punishing him for committing weight to the lead leg so readily, and Almeida had success both slipping the jab in isolation and discouraging it with the threat of massive swarms off cross-counters over the top.
But suddenly, near the end of round 1, Font’s jab gained another dimension — little off-rhythm jabs directly off the feints, and flicking out throwaway jabs in succession just to keep Almeida moving around. While Almeida could hold his ground and hit earlier, now the jab was annoying to time and potentially exhausting to overreact to, even if Font didn’t get to jab directly through Almeida’s head the way he wanted in the early stages of the fight. Almeida responded to this with naked aggression, which didn’t totally fail — but clearly, he’d stopped being so comfortable at range, as the counters to the jab weren’t on quite the same hair-trigger.
Font very quickly took advantage, drawing out both of the answers Almeida had shown in the first round. First, the inside leg-kick — where this counter gained most of its utility was the fact that it knocked Font’s weight out from under him on big jabs, and kept sound follow-ups impossible. Font throwing the jab away meant that his weight wasn’t committed — he could keep his balance as Almeida kicked, continuing to force him to move around as he put himself on one leg, and eventually landing a stiff rear hand off the throwaway as Almeida recovered from a low kick.
Response #2 was the slips/slip-counters — Almeida immediately turned to those more once the legkick became more dangerous, but Font could draw those out too. A couple of lighter jabs moved Almeida into a deep slip over his rear hip as he tried to determine whether Font was going to expose himself with another huge offering, and Font wrecked him with a rear hand as he was stranded out of position. Almeida never truly recovered, and was finished within the round.
Very few fights show a jab compounding quite as quickly as Font/Almeida did — as the Brazilian went from being totally comfortable and largely in control of the engagements to nervous and overreacting in about 30 seconds. In fact, the facet of Font’s jab that made Almeida such a winnable fight so quickly — using them as throwaways to wear on him with pace — took Calvin Kattar quite a while longer to figure out; while he also had a stellar jab, Kattar was much more similar to an elevated version of Font’s approach early, as tighter jabbing form and more convincing feints meant that his rhythm was largely inscrutable even while his jab was tuned towards being a truly hurting shot the vast majority of the time. Kattar’s jab was classically sharp and clean, and set up big entries where he bombed his opponents out — but Font’s jab was a needling and constant interruption, one which didn’t always hurt badly but always demanded an answer.
However, while Kattar took a page from the Font book to rip Giga Chikadze apart in early-2022, mid-2021 saw Font’s most Kattar-reminiscent performance — a fight where the jab itself was the most damage-dealing weapon in many of the exchanges, and the grave moment-to-moment danger of swarming meant that Font needed discipline and defensiveness over indiscriminate volume at range. At the time of his meeting with Font, Cody Garbrandt was directly off one of the scariest knockouts of his entire career — on the fence in a largely 50/50 fight, Garbrandt found a huge rear hook to put away one of the best bantamweights of all time, Raphael Assunção. In many contexts, Garbrandt was considered one of the better boxers in the sport at the time — perhaps plagued by poor decisionmaking, but whose absurd speed in exchanges and sharp combination-punching in close made it nearly impossible to safely navigate exchanges. Even during Garbrandt’s skid post-title, both TJ Dillashaw and Pedro Munhoz found themselves in grave danger of being finished — Font didn’t, as the strength of his skillset at range left the former champion baffled and battered through the greater part of 25 minutes.
Garbrandt is classically much more comfortable on the counter than on the lead — and Font immediately looked to overload him on the counter with looks at long range. Font has run into issues in the past in terms of having a fairly pared-down game that flows almost entirely through a single tool — but he could also show the jab in a multitude of different ways that kept Garbrandt from keying on his entries for counters. Feinting the step-in, or pawing in with his lead hand, or even just getting into a deep crouch (from where Font largely fired the long power-jab) forced Garbrandt into responding with huge entries at all the wrong times, where the actual jab consistently surprised him. Again, the differences in the commitment of the jab was massive — Font could get into the posture of a power-jab only to flick out feelers that Garbrandt couldn’t preempt, or he could shock Garbrandt from very far out with jolts as he stepped across himself to account for Cody’s lateral movement.
While Font was always a fantastic offensive fighter, where the Garbrandt fight really shined was Font’s defensive approach — putting on so much volume would always chance counters, but Font would dip with his power-jabs or weave off his rear hand and Garbrandt’s usual counter-selection was suddenly completely useless, even despite his speed and reactions. Font’s rear hand often just naturally leaves him off the center line, but against a hooker in Garbrandt, he made sure that he would be underneath the best that the Californian had to offer.
The other defensive matter is, again, how Font dealt with the ever-present threat of the cross-counter against a hooking blitzer who wanted to close distance around the jab — Font’s low stance and his built-in defensive considerations on the jab (staying behind his lead shoulder) kept that specific counter extremely difficult to implement. Even when Garbrandt decided to stop waiting on Font in the fifth round, he largely couldn’t find Font’s head at all, even if he moved Font around a bit by catching his shoulders. Note the clinch-entry into the knee off catching the right hand on his shoulder, at 3:38 left in round 5 — comes back later.
Both Font and Kattar have a real love of the uppercut, and Font used it to punish Garbrandt harshly for really keying on the cross-counter as the fight went on — Garbrandt would throw all his weight in behind the rear hand and look to follow up with a shifting left hook as the initial counter largely failed to land, but Font would draw the counter with a throwaway jab and look to take his head off before Garbrandt could get his head over his feet after the overhand. This landed a few times to the body, and as Garbrandt found himself in a hole in round 5, Font got him with a monstrous uppercut that ended any hopes of a late rally.
Font/Garbrandt was one of the better contender performances one can find — Font approached it with the composure and patience of a champion, and the skillset and focus of a true bantamweight elite. Even more impressively, it was a fight against his usual instincts of swarming incredibly hard — Font put up incredible and historic numbers on the erstwhile champion, but he also exposed himself to as little danger as possible against an opponent with a truly fatal threat in the pocket. However, as versatile and crafty as Font is as a pure boxer in MMA, this isn’t really what differentiates him — Font could play the sniper at the edge of his own jab very well (boxing up Sergio Pettis at 135 looks like no mean feat at this point, even) but his most unique moments come at a different spot.
II — The Storm
While Font’s style at long range is gorgeous, another difference between him and Kattar is that one of them is far more comfortable under fire in extended close-range exchanges — both have the tendency to get into violent shootouts, but Kattar is a great deal better-equipped as a raw defensive fighter, and his durability gives him far greater margins for error. That isn’t to say Font is uniquely lacking in either, but Kattar’s phenomenal high-guard defusing the vast majority of offense against the clever and varied combinations of Josh Emmett is unlikely for someone like Font, and Kattar is nearly impossible to even hurt (where Font is much more noteworthy for inhuman recoverability after being hurt quite badly). Where this difference most clearly shows is the relationship that Kattar and Font have with counterpunching — Kattar is completely fine allowing his opponent to run into a wall at their own pace, as he did against Dan Ige and Andre Fili, but as seen earlier, most of Font’s defense is tied to his offense on the lead (getting behind his shoulders on the jab, keeping the rear hand up to catch, the dips and weaves as he throws). One could very credibly make the argument that this comes down to Font’s late start in MMA — the story of how he found out about fighting while delivering pizzas at 20 years old made the rounds before the Garbrandt fight, mostly as a curious yet meaningless fact, but defensive instincts are also extremely difficult to learn late to the same level as early-starters.
However, the way both fighters have developed has turned the difference into something a bit more complex than Kattar simply being better at one important skill. On the Kattar side, his comfort with a fight where his opponent dictates the manner and frequency of exchanges sometimes led to slower and less decisive fights than necessary — getting robbed blind by Josh Emmett’s inaccurate enthusiasm and going all five rounds with an overmatched Dan Ige were arguably avoidable by an insanely durable boxer less comfortable sitting back and letting his opponent come to him. On the other hand, Rob Font found quite a simple solution to the fact that his proactive defense far outstrips his reactions — and that solution was “always be leading”. Font was referenced as being ringcraft-agnostic a bit earlier, but directionally, he is anything but — as Font’s career has progressed, he has become absolutely monomaniacal about brute-forcing his way to taking the front foot, even with a skillset at range that seems more attuned to maintaining some distance and keeping a less torrid pace.
This approach appears a bit counter-intuitive for a fighter who’s hurtable in moments — but there are some very good reasons for it. The first is the obvious — Font’s reactive defense is a lot harder to test when he’s constantly jabbing, forcing the load onto his proactive defense and funnelling his opponents into a few established responses to jabs (the cross-counters he dealt with against Garbrandt, for instance) instead of a potentially more varied arsenal on the lead. Secondly, very few fighters can keep their composure under an assault like that of Rob Font — even someone who finds the room to lead likely shows their hand far too early and far too conclusively against an opponent racking up points so quickly. This likely explains why Font’s last three losses are against three of the most comfortable anti-volume fighters in bantamweight history — Marlon Vera has made a career of biding his time against volume-fighters to destroy them in moments, Raphael Assunção is historically almost impossible to enforce volume on through his positioning and counters, and Jose Aldo has elements of both. On the other hand, even very capable counterpunchers alternated between passivity and desperation against a Font who stayed in their face, even as he got a bit wilder positionally.
For instance, one of Font’s riskier tendencies is his love of the shifting flurry — in many situations, he leaves himself fairly vulnerable to strong counterpunchers by being so willing to leave his stance, and big linear entries do hurt him as a fighter who seems to want to put his opponent on the fence. However, the upside to this approach is much more prominent against opponents who shell statically — which Font’s jab is great at forcing. Both the Moraes and de Andrade fights saw strong counterpunchers get volume-jabbed into uncertainty, where Font could force their guard medially and come around with marching overhands and huge uppercuts that would otherwise be quite dangerous.
At least against Garbrandt specifically, he covered this tendency very well — only committing to the shifting flurry when he’d occupied Garbrandt’s mind in a different way, drawing his hands downward with the threat of the front kick to the body and running him down with brutal offense as he was too busy moving to keep himself in position to fire back.
However, the final reason pushing wild volume works for Font is almost entirely unique to him — and that is the way Font’s clinchgame interacts with his striking at range. Font’s answer to being less optimized for extended exchanges inside the range of his own straights is an extremely clever system of clinch entries off his own straight punches; Font turning longer exchanges into a grabby mess turns him into a deceptively “all-the-way-in or all-the-way-out” style of fighter, while also being an absurd swarmer, which is almost paradoxical under normal circumstances. Oddly, Font’s strategic approach almost resembles that of many of the current Chute Boxe fighters — whose lead hands alternate between stabbing and grabbing to push a pace that would otherwise seem suicidal.
Revisiting the Almeida fight, one of the tools Font used very often was the frame; off his lead hand, Font could convert the jab to stifle Almeida mid-combination, taking away several options for Almeida by simply physically manipulating him whenever possible instead of trying to just compete on Almeida’s terrain. Almeida turning to the outside slip made this actionable — Font could shove him backwards with the extended lead hand and close distance to convert to an extended clinch situation (where Font could keep the lead hand on Almeida and batter him with the rear hand), or use the frame to force Almeida out to his own rear side and intercept him.
Against Garbrandt, where keeping track of his position was paramount (as he’d fallen in love with dropping below the line of sight in exchanges on the fence to pop up with the hook), Font’s grabby game gained a lot of utility. Garbrandt was quick, but Font was proactive — preemptively converting the jab to frames and posts meant he could shove Garbrandt back upright or simply hold him down to prevent the weight transfer of the monster hook, and the extended lead arm let him keep a bead on where Garbrandt was at all times.
On the other hand, slipping to the inside came with the risk of Font converting to the collar-tie instead — Douglas Silva de Andrade ran into this numerous times, as he’d try to swing over the top of Font’s jab only for Font’s lead arm to both obstruct the overhand and kill his posture to line him up for knees. Ricky Simon had some success slip-countering against Font as well, only for something similar to happen — Font could track his head and grab, and trying to back away wouldn’t really work when Font was attached to him. Note how easily the collar-tie entry can be threatened in a jabbing exchange; it’s essentially the same motion, but the depth of the jab makes the clinch entry much more difficult to dissuade with urgency.
Where this came to a head was against the great Jose Aldo — even in a loss, Font navigated the thunderous counters of the legendary Brazilian champion for minutes at a time, and a lot of that success came down to his consistent concessions to the threat of the cross-counter. Garbrandt’s exaggerated reactions made the clinch entries easier, but Aldo’s subtler and sounder ones made the clinch entries more useful; Font is always low under his shoulder when he really commits to the jab, and the collar-tie gives him the tools to consistently recounter as soon as he catches the right hand on it. Insofar as anyone can consistently strand Aldo over his hip, Font does it here several times by simply holding him out of place as he moves his head, and Font’s other looks (the uppercut to keep Aldo from just ducking straight down, feinting the jab and getting off the center with the form on his rear hand) mean that Aldo spends a surprising amount of time struggling to counter someone right in front of him.
All of these considerations came together for Font to address (to date) his last opponent, an extremely promising prospect in Adrian Yanez. Yanez had devastated his previous opponents with varied and sound combination work up to his meeting with Font — as he looked like a frightening hitter with well-schooled counters and the composure to allow him to use it. In general, he often played the part of a pressure-counterpuncher — using his presence to induce his opponent to lead, and using those leads as opportunities to build superb multi-level flurries that finished most of his opponents in the UFC up to that point. Even when Randy Costa had some success jabbing him, Yanez took back over quickly — eating up space over his feet and letting Costa exhaust himself before sneaking bodyshots around his elbows and an uppercut through his forearms. Yanez’s comfort in exchanges and his dynamism compared to Font made the fight extremely dangerous, as jabbing on Yanez’s terms could lead to a swift and brutal end — instead, it just became another version of the Almeida fight for Font, as his range-work and transitional nous solved the Texan prospect on every level.
Adrian Yanez very quickly showed his hand against Rob Font — Font came in with a few 1-2s early, and Yanez responded by sneaking his own right hand between the jab and straight, finding some very clean intercepting connections. Font found some early lands as well, but Yanez standing his ground and timing Font led to a few collisions that would likely favor the younger man — not to mention the ostensibly bigger hitter.
So Font naturally changed things up a bit, as soon as Yanez found the timing on his favored counters — shocking Yanez with hard spearing jabs in succession or half-jabs into offbeat straights, feinting and probing with his lead hand, or jabbing with Yanez (timing him between his own double jab, or catching him simultaneously by angling into Yanez’s stance while jabbing). After those few early counters, Font didn’t give Yanez anything for free.
Font also gained information very early in the fight on how Yanez would deal with the threat of the collar-tie — as he immediately started threatening the grabs in the middle of the jabbing. Yanez responded with huge combinations, looking to take Font out quickly for every attempt at getting close — but this was a blunder, even though it led to at least one very loud connection.
Font responded by closing distance anyway — Yanez tried a second 1-1-2 in a row, Font was the one sneaking his lead hand between the combination this time, and the cross-counter once again found the shoulder as Font grabbed (1). Font could smother the offense on the inside with the double collar-tie (2), but he could also just get low again as Yanez looked to knock him out with the hook — all Yanez did with his aggression was essentially force Font to yank him off-balance and ruin his footing (3). Font quickly followed with an uppercut, as Yanez slowly returned to being upright with Font’s collar-tie still affecting his posture (4), leading to the final push.
Font immediately started hunting Yanez down, with the tools seen earlier — using the jab to keep Yanez busy and hide the arrival of the right, and get Yanez moving his head out of position in the meantime. Font’s varied rear hand is a massive upside as well — he doesn’t put much emphasis on cutting the cage with his feet (and the shifting flurries make that tough anyway), but Yanez tried to escape the straight several times only to walk directly into the rear hook to the body. Also note the sneaky little grab-uppercut a second time as Yanez shells.
Two more attempted cross-counters later, Yanez was done.
III — In Sum
For all the easy comparisons Font elicits to his teammate in Kattar, one fighter who’s shockingly similar to Font in terms of the broad process of his game is former middleweight champion Michael Bisping; the overwhelming 1-2-collartie approach was a staple of the great Brit, and it led to a long career of relevance as a contender before he broke through to the belt — although that approach did lead to similar issues when he didn’t win. For one, the eternal curse of the volume fighter is how it tends to require unreasonable durability at the very top level — as many defensive concessions as possible can be made, but the only way for this kind of fighter to win is to be in positions to get hit a lot. Where someone like Max Holloway could simply physically afford the constant trial-and-error that entailed a volume win over Jose Aldo, it’s a high bar, especially at a division full of extremely crafty opponents who don’t necessarily have to jerry-rig their way past throwing down in exchanges. While the skill-level on display was very different, Font’s losses to Aldo and Vera were almost spiritual successors of how Bisping ran into trouble against Wanderlei Silva and in the rematch against Dan Henderson — where winning minutes meant avoiding landmines while stepping inches away from them for minutes at a time, and doing it for 25 minutes straight for a decisive win would’ve needed a massive gap in craft that simply didn’t exist.
For Font, even being a lot more systematized as a clincher and sharper defensively than Bisping at his best (where Bisping never really learned to not simply get hit very hard any time someone countered his jab) likely won’t lead to the same results — bantamweight is messy from a pecking-order perspective but it isn’t as messy as 185 at that time, and the age ceiling is a lot stricter. At the time of writing, Font is booked for his return to Boston, over five years after his triumph over Almeida — this time, he’s facing Song Yadong, an extremely dynamic counterpuncher who loves cross-counters, and isn’t particularly comfortable dealing with transitional work or crafty offense at long range. Regardless, it’s an extremely compelling fight for Font — as an archetype, he’s constantly flirting with danger, so a hitter like Song likely always poses some real intrigue. It’s one where Font’s tendency to subtly adapt and change his jabbing tactics through a fight could return dividends, or might simply not be allowed to show up at all — and even as Font likely takes over hard down the stretch, it’s unlikely he’ll do anything but keep pushing a hard pace and forcing Yadong into shootouts.
Nevertheless, Font’s success at the highest level is incredibly impressive, even up to this point; at a division that’s disproportionately dynamic and has several extremely well-versed boxers, Font’s late start in MMA should make succeeding with a high-volume boxing style almost impossible. Instead, even in losses (with the exception of Assunção), Font at his peak has spent almost every minute on the feet forcing bigger hitters to try to take him out — and due to an approach perfectly tuned to hide his areas of discomfort, very few have managed to make him pay for arguably doing more interesting things per minute than any fighter on Earth. Even with some losses on his way up, Font has also built a quite substantial résumé at 135; his clean sweep and jabbing clinic over current Bellator bantamweight king Sergio Pettis deserved more than passing mention, as did his phenomenal fight (and win) against a bit of a style nightmare in a pressure-wrestling Ricky Simon. This started out with a mention of Petr Yan, and in many ways, Font is his exact opposite — where Yan’s defense and footwork (on the attack, at least) are fantastic, he’s now spent several fights seemingly totally unaware of what his approach should be. On the other hand, Font is happy to walk into the fire with the knowledge that any win he gets is probably on the other side of it — and more often than not, that’s exactly what he’s found.