The Sandman Cometh: Cory Sandhagen's Elevation
Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
In February 2019, a de facto champion was crowned for 135; with the beltholder TJ Dillashaw’s loss to Henry Cejudo at 125, the rematch between veterans Raphael Assuncao and Marlon Moraes was the fight to determine the man at bantamweight. The Brazilian pair’s stranglehold on contendership was such that very few could even challenge it — at that point, no one at the weight had beaten Assuncao on their first try, including Dillashaw and Moraes, and Moraes’ massacre over ranked contenders had only been disrupted by that immensely disputable loss. Moraes got his revenge over the legend in Fortaleza, and acknowledged his newfound place in the division as the man who should be sought after, a champion in function even if the belt was elsewhere (and soon to be nowhere).
About twenty months after that, though, Marlon Moraes and Raphael Assuncao had both sustained a common loss — to a fighter who was less than four years into his professional career when those contenders were on top of the world. As Assuncao/Moraes 2 occurred, Cory Sandhagen had just gotten an unremarkable but well-executed win; weeks prior, he’d submitted an overmatched Mario Bautista after a flying knee that had rattled the replacement to his boots. The young prospect had promise, but the nature of the rise that happened afterwards was extraordinary — as Sandhagen went on to defeat both of Brazil’s best bantamweights in emphatic fashion, proving himself as one of the elite in perhaps the toughest division in the sport.
Answering A Riddle
As the UFC should have learned from years of booking him, Raphael Assuncao is classically the last fighter to give a prospect that’s meant to do big things. The Assuncao name means a lot on a record, but before his loss to Cody Garbrandt (which finally showed that Assuncao is also vulnerable to aging), that value was significantly offset by just how difficult it was to even look competent against him. Some might attribute that to Assuncao being a bit more negative a fighter than many at bantamweight — in a sharp contrast to most elites, Assuncao often made his hay doing nothing but counterpunching on the backfoot — but the absurd longevity of the Brazilian was a function of exactly that patience and craft, and even a buzzsaw like TJ Dillashaw had to fight a more disciplined fight than he was used to against Assuncao’s deceptive depth as a striker. From the hard-nosed pressurer Pedro Munhoz, to the slick jabber Rob Font, to the shifts and angles of Dillashaw, there wasn’t a type of fighter Assuncao hadn’t seen — nor one that he hadn’t been able to manufacture some form of success against.
Cory Sandhagen had won (if narrowly) his step-up to the top-10 tier when he toppled John Lineker, but 2019 Assuncao was not only the gatekeeper to the certifiably elite bantamweights, he was also a very different challenge in nature. Lineker was the sort to gleefully go punch-for-punch with Sandhagen in Sandhagen’s preferred fight, where the threat of Assuncao’s ringcraft and distancing was that volume simply wouldn’t be enforceable. Sandhagen put on a performance that made those factors look nonexistent.
The first round in Assuncao/Sandhagen showed both men to be surprisingly versatile, as both had a nice rapid-fire series of questions and answers in the first few minutes. From the start, Sandhagen was feinting forward to push the counterpuncher back and dull his reads — but more immediately, to draw Assuncao’s parry out. Assuncao’s response to the jab/straight game of Rob Font was simply to extend his arms and obstruct both, denying safe distance-measuring tools and getting Font walking onto counters very early — but Sandhagen the jabber simply drew Assuncao’s hands and looped around and between them with his rear hand.
The next time Sandhagen tried to draw the parry out, Assuncao took a different tack — instead of waiting for Sandhagen to enter as the handfight revealed itself, Assuncao used Sandhagen’s aggression against him, breaking into southpaw as he angled back into the open side to crack Sandhagen as he shifted in. But Sandhagen’s response was really the core of who he is as a fighter — Sandhagen might have a few vulnerabilities, but he’s such an active problem-solver who throws enough volume that he gets data very quickly.
The next time Assuncao tried to hit that open-stance counter, Sandhagen had proactively ducked underneath it. The time after that, Sandhagen had thrown away the straight to draw it out, and easily pulled away. The fourth time, Sandhagen not only had the strike figured, but also its tempo — Sandhagen jabbed to draw the left hand and the right behind it off-beat (essentially, the right was in progress before the jab had even returned), messing with the timing of Assuncao’s counter as he turned the right into a frame to block it. In less than 90 seconds, Assuncao’s solution had become a vulnerability.
It was here that the fight started to spiral out of control for the great Brazilian, at least on the feet, as Sandhagen unveiled one of his greatest strengths as a striker — his bodywork. As Austin Arnett can attest, they certainly aren’t enjoyable, but more importantly, Sandhagen’s commitment to weakening his opponent’s stamina conceptually dovetails with his torrid pace and active feinting — both in giving him another target and in speeding his opponent’s fatigue. Sandhagen again makes use of drawing out the parry for a hurting left hook underneath the arms, but also starts playing his kicks off each other (where Assuncao had dealt decently with Sandhagen just legkicking him) and aiming his right to the body to cut off the lateral movement of Assuncao — at every stage, variety is key for Sandhagen.
Assuncao did keep trying to find answers, but the trick of Sandhagen’s style is that one answer is never enough — especially with Assuncao’s style, which gave Sandhagen all the license to trial-and-error ways around them. For instance, Assuncao manages to find a left off the handfight — but the next two times he tries it, it was by Sandhagen’s design, as he’d drawn that specific counter out until Assuncao felt it wasn’t worth it anymore. Sandhagen using the handfight to draw out a left hook and land a flying knee is brilliant, and shows how Sandhagen’s unorthodoxy is often for a defined and intelligent purpose (which is seen again in the Moraes fight). Assuncao would continue to land some clean shots through rounds 2 and 3 — but Sandhagen kept them isolated, which is the best anyone can hope for against a counterpuncher that skilled.
If Assuncao had a real option in this fight after the first round, it was the wrestling and the grappling, but even Sandhagen’s complete lack of takedown defense got bailed out here (although it wouldn’t always be). Assuncao could simply drag Sandhagen down from rear-standing without an issue or finish any leg attacks, but Sandhagen’s relentless scrambling kept him from getting controlled in this fight. Sandhagen’s reliance on things like kimura-traps more than actual takedown defense is an issue, but given his scrambling in this fight, there likely are some complications to a control-wrestling route for most fighters.
It bears repeating that Raphael Assuncao has long been one of the most stout elite-gatekeepers that the sport has ever seen. Even in a division where the prospects were absolutely terrific, Assuncao repeatedly made them look like nothing at all, up to the ripe old age — for a bantamweight, at least — of his later 30s. He had a courageous performance against the new guard here, but Sandhagen was too much for him, in a way that even Dillashaw and Moraes weren’t — at least the first time they faced Assuncao. That Sandhagen won this fight fairly dominantly about five years into his professional career is absolutely shocking in every respect — and there was somehow more to come, albeit after a stumble.
Defusing A Bomb
After the Assuncao win, Sandhagen stepped into a fight against Aljamain Sterling, which went about as badly as it could have for the young contender. The fairly reckless anti-grappling style of Sandhagen simply did not work against the best top-player at the weight, and Sterling fought exactly the fight to make that very clear — pressuring hard to the cage, and taking full advantage of Sandhagen’s tendency to give up rear-standing by just taking his back and choking him out. In terms of “prospect losses”, it really didn’t get much better — Sterling showed Sandhagen exactly what he needed to improve, and the fight was not damaging even if it was completely one-sided. It was the equivalent of Carlos Condit’s quick submission loss to Demian Maia, but if Condit had sustained it when he had the years left to actually make some changes to his style.
That said, after that kind of loss, the smart path for Sandhagen might’ve been to take a step back — he’d proven himself a top 5 and had nothing but time to fight for the belt eventually, so fighting a Jimmie Rivera or a Cody Stamann would’ve been a reasonable fight to gauge improvements and get back on track for another crack at the top. Instead — as a function of both the UFC’s reckless matchmaking and likely Sandhagen’s own confidence in his abilities — Sandhagen faced Marlon Moraes, the #1 contender and one of the most destructively dynamic bantamweights in the history of the division. After the Assuncao rematch, Moraes had faltered in his bid for the undisputed title against an undeniable Henry Cejudo, but even Cejudo needed to show durability from head-to-toe to get through the first few rounds. Moraes’ absolutely crippling kicking game and his terrific counterpunching posed a serious issue to anyone in the division, including the man who’d just submitted Sandhagen in seconds, as Sterling was stiffened in short order by Moraes’ knee in his last loss. It wasn’t a fight that would test Sandhagen’s grappling defense, but it would test everything else — or so it seemed, before Sandhagen put together one of the cleanest performances of his career against the most potent foe he’d ever faced.
Like Assuncao’s anti-jab game, Sandhagen went into the Moraes fight keenly aware of Marlon Moraes’ most dangerous tools. From the start of the fight, Sandhagen was feinting out Moraes’ kicks — while his relatively loose footwork would be inconvenient for checking kicks or even planting and countering them, Sandhagen could simply pull the kicks out of Moraes the way he did punches, with throwaways and feints. Moraes landed one very hard leg kick on the lead, but no kicks on the counter, as Sandhagen left his timing suspect throughout the fight.
However, Moraes did have some real success in the boxing against Sandhagen. Moraes didn’t lead much in the fight, but when he did, it appeared to be a tactic to take advantage of Sandhagen’s linear retreats when he’s blitzed back — Moraes would look for a shifting left hook that mostly missed, but it also elicited the reaction that he wanted from Sandhagen, of just trying to outrun Moraes’ shift on the backfoot instead of angling out the way he would in a non-blitzing exchange. Both John Lineker and Iuri Alcantara found some success doing the same, but more committed to pressure and combinations; Moraes was mostly done with the one huge distance-covering strike, where Sandhagen could retreat and then just keep maneuvering in the open.
Moraes’ signature counters were also there, particularly early in the fight before Sandhagen had started to build on his looks. Sandhagen’s active lead hand was a pleasure to watch as he cycled through jabs, left hooks, lead uppercuts, and that left bodyshot; however, when he got overzealous at playing with Moraes’ guard, Moraes’ counterpunching was there to check him. About a minute into the first round, Moraes found his best sequence of the fight — countering the left hook to the body with a cuffing left hook of his own, using that to herd Sandhagen into a cleaner right hand, then drawing Sandhagen’s jab to crack him with a huge overhand right. Extended exchanges were still Moraes’ game.
As he did against Assuncao, Sandhagen went to work drawing out the counterpunches of Moraes, and it worked even better against Moraes due to the commitment with which Moraes threw his shots and his existing endurance liability. Sandhagen could throw away his jab to draw the overhand, or dip out off his straights to complicate the left hook, and Moraes didn’t quite find the connections he needed after the first 2 minutes or so.
Sandhagen’s grasp on Moraes’ counterpunching was incredibly strong by the later half of round 1, and that’s when he started converting that read into offense. This is the quintessential Sandhagen game — Cory finds that Moraes is using Sandhagen’s lead hand as his own gauge of distance, catching it to fire back, so Sandhagen simply touches Moraes’ lead hand to draw out the counter-jab and punishes him with a huge rear uppercut.
Moraes wasn’t completely cowed by the later part of the fight, but he was struggling immensely to both time good counters and not waste energy by biting on all the static Sandhagen was putting out, and he opted to err on the side of the latter the more the fight went on. Sandhagen used this uncertainty to get to the bodywork late, in the form of several nasty kicks to the torso — Moraes started to just retreat on Sandhagen’s output consistently instead of planting and countering, and Sandhagen found huge kicks on Moraes’ exits that certainly didn’t help the gas tank issue. In true Sandhagen fashion, he built on that too, hitting a Brazilian kick in round 2 (playing off the threat to the body to switch the kick up to the head) that apparently broke Moraes’ orbital.
The same body-head switch brought about the finish, a nice wheel kick that caught Moraes on the top of the head. Sandhagen had thrown it to the body in the first round and Moraes had responded accordingly, but the same response got him leaning into it this time — although the end was more a culmination of all the damage Sandhagen had dealt to that point, to Moraes’ body and to his confidence.
Moraes is a tremendously difficult fighter to even survive, let alone defeat — Raphael Assuncao managed it once but got crushed the second time in minutes, and once Marlon got into the swing of things, top contenders like Sterling and Jimmie Rivera struggled to last a round with the Brazilian dynamo. At one time, Moraes easily could’ve been a pound-for-pound talent, one ranking quite highly; being the best bantamweight in the world is as tough a task as any in the sport, and for a moment, Moraes was that. Sandhagen not only won that fight, he won it in a way that no one had defeated Moraes in his prime; Cejudo had to walk through hell and Assuncao barely scraped a questionable decision over Moraes in their first fight, but Sandhagen crushed him with ease, despite having significantly less experience and perhaps not even being a finished product the way Marlon is. Sandhagen was a big favorite over his early opponents for a reason, but Sandhagen is the rare fighter who’s justified his early promise and then some.
Parting Thoughts
There’s virtually no way to overstate how impressive Cory Sandhagen’s campaign has been — even taking into account that swift loss to Sterling, it’s a genuinely absurd run from a fighter who started professionally in 2015. To take Sterling himself as an example of a relatively regular developmental curve, it was around this point in his career that he was losing to Bryan Caraway and Assuncao — and now he’s barely recognizable as a fighter with the improvements that he’s made to every component of his game, improvements that Sandhagen might still be yet to access. With Sterling ahead of him, Sandhagen has a mountain to climb to actually be the champion any time soon — but there are few fighters as poised to just outlast the rest of the field as Sandhagen. Perhaps unfortunately, one of those few is Petr Yan, the incumbent bantamweight champion, who himself is 6 years into his career and might even be further along than Sandhagen comparatively — but Yan vs. Sandhagen is also one of the very best fights possible in the sport, one that’s nearly guaranteed with the youth of both. With a keen understanding of fighting and adjusting tactically, as well as a terrific camp for development behind him, the run of “The Sandman” has likely only just begun, and that’s an absolutely terrifying proposition.