Scientific Crudeness: Jessica Andrade
Photo by Buda Mendes/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Jessica Andrade has a certain reputation among MMA fans. Brawler. Tough (though Zhang cracked that chin). Unfeasibly strong. Technique though? Forgetaboutit. She'll come at her opponent swinging till she's close enough to grab them, at which point she throws them about like a sack of grain till the fight ends.
All of those things are, in fact, true. It's just that they don't tell the whole story, because for all the limitations of her technical skill, Jessica Andrade is a smart fighter, one who can both react on the fly in a situation and adapt her approaches in a gameplan as far as her limits will allow. An opponent who overlooks this fact is asking for trouble. Since she's about to face Rose Namajunas — a fighter who did indeed seem to overlook this fact — for the second time, let's take a look at a couple of the things that Andrade did the first time (plus cameo appearances from earlier performances) to highlight the point.
The first thing she tried against Namajunas — and this may surprise some readers since the general impression of Andrade's footwork is 'bullrush' — is to cut the cage off with angled steps. This did not work at all, because she wasn't moving fast and has no head movement, and therefore Rose had more than enough time to touch her and circle away (something Andrade is entitled to have been surprised by, since even in her best performance before this — Jedrzejczyk 2 — Namajunas was not noted for her lateral movement in escapes) and Andrade ended up just following anyway.
The second part of the plan was to close to just the edge of range and (instead of punching) kick Rose's lead leg, and while this made sense in terms of an attrition strategy, it was also, in isolation, a problem. The kicking left her completely out of stance and let Rose light her up like a Christmas tree, something that also happened when she just decided to trade shots to the head, getting her knocked down with about a minute and a half to go in the first round when Rose hit her with a couple of punches and a knee to the body that sent Andrade staggering to the ground.
That (once she got up, that is) was when Andrade decided she needed to do something about how this was going. The first adjustment was instantly clear. Until that point in the fight, one of Rose's chief weapons had been a check hook, letting Anrade sail past her while she pivoted out and clipped her. The first time they engaged after the knockdown, she did it again, but the time after that, Andrade simply let her throw it and kicked the standing leg. This seemed like a relatively small success in the moment, but it was a key turning point in the fight, since the confidence went out of Rose's movement pretty much immediately — up until that point, Andrade had trapped her on the fence once in four and a half minutes, but after that kick, Rose backed herself onto the cage for no good reason at the very next chance Andrade got to pressure.
The second adjustment was bodyshots. This one should be a lot more obvious than it often is in MMA, but in any case, it worked. When trading purely to the head, Andrade had no chance, since Rose has nice head movement and far better punching mechanics; as soon as Andrade threw to the body, though, she realised the champion not only didn’t really know how to defend against that, but the threat took some sting out of her striking — here a similar knee to the one that dropped her before does nothing as Namajunas compromised her own stance trying to curl away from the strikes.
The second round didn't immediately look like a vast improvement for Andrade. Namajunas was still tagging her and getting away, she was still chasing. The champion's movement was visibly compromised, though. The check hook and pivots were still there, but she was less confident, with far more of her initial movement being straight backwards to just get clear. Where in the first round she'd been taken to the fence twice and otherwise was nowhere near for the whole round, now she was driven to it four times in the opening two minutes. She managed to slip out as Andrade stopped short, but it was last-second, almost-panicked stuff and — in order to turn that 'almost' into actual panic — was where the Brazilian made her final adjustment.
Of course, normally as fans of technique, we don't like bullrushes. They're crude ugly things that can be punished with a good pivot, and since Rose had been doing the checkhook matador thing with Andrade's less wild movement, bringing back more wild runs would seem counter-intuitive. Don't forget, though, that the check and pivot had already been compromised (a lack of confidence Andrade continued to push as Rose tried it again) and — as had been noted by some observers before the fight — Rose's movement otherwise tends to rely on her punches having enough of an interrupting effect on her opponent's movement, to allow her to de-set her feet and get away.
So when, after a couple of exploratory, less committed attempts, Andrade just bit down and threw herself at her flurrying punches in a straight line, Rose reacted badly. From delivering power with straight-lined movement from the feet on up, she turned to punches that barely develop from beyond the elbow, let alone the shoulders. The first rush sent her bouncing off the fence, barely escaping Anrade’s level change attempt. The second rush she tries to defuse with a takedown of her own, but there's no idea behind it and they're right back up again immediately.
The third one, after a few exchanges in which both leg kicks and bodyshots visibly make Namajunas cringe, resulted in a clinch — and after that, once Andrade figured out how to fight the kimura trap that was Rose's defence of choice, we know what happened next. Notice also how in both clips, Andrade launches her flurry directly after eating shots, realising Rose had neither a follow-up counter nor a kick of the strikes set up to punish her for leaning in but instead needed space to reset.
So that's the story of Andrade and her underrated adjustments, but just to drive the point home, we'll take a quick look at a (very) losing performance that nonetheless shows her changing her movement, with some effect, in different ways to here.
Against Jedrzejczyk, Andrade tried the extended flurries, but despite a couple of initially successful attempts, Joanna's movement was far too good, and her pivots far less vulnerable to being kicked out from under her, so it just never came close to working.
As the fight went on though, Andrade will have noted that the then-champion, as many fighters on the back foot do, was using the double octagon lines as a trigger to angle away. So what Andrade would eventually do is edge her opponent just to the edge of the lines, and then quite literally just jump at her, winging punches.
Now, jumping in is not something we at The Fight Site would normally encourage, any more than we do bullrushing, and certainly if Andrade could find more educated ways (feints, head movement) to achieve the same effect, she would have been better off. Nonetheless, even though she was far too compromised, too outskilled (in the clinch and out), and too out-speeded for it to work every time (or even to get her true success when it did), her best moments throughout the latter half of the fight came from doing this, and if she had a shot at victory it was there. Joanna never can resist trading a few shots in the pocket if an opponent can take her there, despite it being her worst position, and it led to Andrade landing a few and taking her to the fence a few times.
Obviously that is not something Andrade should be thinking about doing this weekend specifically (Joanna doesn't punch hard enough to knock her down even when Andrade was in a bad stance, whereas we saw above that Rose very much does), but it's a useful example of her bringing different adjustments based on her opponent's responses.
All that is to say, then: yes, Jessica Andrade is limited, yes she relies on strength. Yes her chin may well be gone now, in which case her need to take shot after shot even as she makes her adjustment will leave her in serious serious trouble. But, as Rose Namajunas has already learned once, underestimate her at your own peril, and do not turn off for a second, because if you do, you're liable to find yourself at gravity's mercy.