The UFC’s Meat-Packing Plant, Part III: Gotta Take One to Take One
On Fundamentals, Institutions, Progression, Process and an Assortment of Other Pithy, Smart-Sounding Buzzwords
*NSFW*
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC
Remember when I talked about how fighter progression in MMA is completely fucked?
No, it’s okay, I don’t remember either, it was like ten years ago.
In the previous installments of the Meat-Packing series we discussed all the ways predatory matchmaking ruins fighters, and it’s something my friends at the Fight Site have written and talked about at length — both on the Fight Site’s MMA Podcast, in Danny Martin’s Metagame series, and in extensive twitter threads where we all expressed our annoyance exhaustively, and at length.
But the TL;DR was that the UFC values nebulous things like name power and potential marketability way more than actual, real things like skill and athleticism and camp cohesion when matching up fighters, which is why we get absolute shitshows like UFC 252 for which the UFC legit has to offer refunds in my opinion. The main event was historically significant but the PPV and the entirety of the card itself were, quite frankly, dogshit.
With UFC 252 we saw what was arguably yet another example of the UFC model biting the organisation right in its fat ass: the zoomer version of Conor McGregor got wiped out in fairly anticlimactic fashion, and the company guy who’s ostensibly the face of the organisation and its George Foreman expy got ground out in a hilarious reversal of his usual “grindy-grindy hippos” schtick.
And a couple of weeks before that we saw yet another prospect with a bunch of quick knockouts on his record get beaten within an inch of his life by a fighter whom many tended to dismiss as an also-ran gatekeeper or even a journeyman despite the fact that most of his losses came in fights against the legitimate cream of the crop in his division. I’m talking of course, about Edmen Shahbazyan and Derek “Bruhson” Brunson.
The best thing to come out of all this though, was a glimpse into an alternate universe where flyweight and heavyweight switched places, and Aleksey Oleinik gassed himself trying to scramble all over the insurmountable behemoth Derrick “the Derrick” Lewis who, using his patented “Belly on Belly” technique, squished Aleksey “the Vanilla Gorilla” Oleinik into a pancake and ate him with a slice of ham and some damn good coffee.
This was followed up with a fairly inoffensive Fight Night card where Pedro Muhnoz had his career-best showing against Frankie Edgar debuting at bantamweight in shockingly good form, albeit the buzz from a legitimately awesome fight was somewhat marred by a pretty annoying headscratcher of a decision.
All in all, a pretty typical assortment of UFC events.
But anyway, you probably already know what I’m here for. What I’m here for is to make weird jokes no one gets, and talk about fighting without using the word “levels” — which is why I’ll never be a big boy smartypants analyst on ESPN.
But as Haxx had succinctly put it in episode 13 of Danny and Sriram’s podcast:
“Fuck being The Guy, it turns you into a UFC stooge”.
Let’s begin!
“Ass♂we♂can”
“AAAAA, FFFFUUCCKKK.”— Ben Kohn.
The number one absolute worst thing you can do as a prospect is to rack up a highlight reel of quick first-round finishes.
Yes, you’re dynamic and exciting and you come from the best stock of only the manliest, most organic, gluten-free, nature-blessed, CBD-oil-infused paleo splooge, so you starched your guy within a minute. I get it, it’s fine, there’s levels to this, gotta put in them reps, hard work, rise’n’grind, 99% of fighting is punching your guy ‘till he’s unconscious, and the remaining 1% die from the ‘Rona, shoutouts to my man Q.
What’s not fine is that it also sets you up for a matchup you’re not ready for in most cases, and we’ve all seen the way the UFC’s hype machine sets up prospects for humiliating failure in Francis Ngannou, Edmen Shahbazyan and, most recently, Sean O’Malley, who apparently was not hurt, as his response to Chito Vera elbowing a hole through his brain was to post a video of himself dancing on what was ostensibly an injured foot — the very same foot that prevented him from totally killing Chito, like, for really reals, man.
Well, I’m not his PR specialist, and as it must have become apparent over the recent months: I’m all here for fighters making fools of themselves because comedy is the only source of entertainment I get these days from MMA.
But I digress.
Sometimes it feels like every event takes on a particular theme that represents a certain aspect of the meta, or becomes a turning point where said aspect gets turned on its head. But in the last six months or so every fight felt more like a buildup to a really drawn out season finale, much like the very year of 2020 itself.
It’s a process that’s been going on since 2014 or so, and every focal point feels like it’s either going to exhaust itself come the new Twenties, or get mixed up and changed into something new and appropriate for its time. The fight game is cyclical, every tool and style are always going to either be era-appropriate, or simply ineffective — that’s the nature of the fight game.
Yet in MMA it’s all still very raw and the growing pains can be felt all across the sport: cage wrestling and takedown defense, striking defense, initiative, work in transitions, gameplanning, the dynamics between various style archetypes in MMA — it may feel like it’s all coming together, coalescing into a cohesive combat system, and yet there’s always something lacking in all of this; everything feels like there’s always that little something that’s missing in most fighters’ approach: a sense of direction.
Where do you want the fight to go? Why do you want the fight to go there? Which tools are you going to pick to accomplish that? And I’m not talking about level changes or takedowns or cage wrestling specifically — I’m not talking about specific techniques at all, I’m talking about the why of things. What do you want and why do you want it? The vast majority of mid-level fighters and sometimes even those in the Top 10 seem to either struggle to nail this particular element down, or display a downright dismissive attitude towards it.
This sport is young, it’s still developing, it’s making tremendous strides, yadda-yadda-yadda — we’ve all heard this spiel before. It’s usually used as a way to justify its inherent dumbness and its general tendency to make the worst things happen in the stupidest way possible, as if all of its problems are going to magic themselves away with time. It doesn’t work that way. First you gotta have a bunch of annoying edgy kids say that you’re wack.
In the previous installments of the Meat-Packing series I’ve talked at length about modern MMA being more akin to an entertainment institute that mostly exists to create highlight videos on YouTube that are then used to sell shitty PPVs rather than a legitimate combat sport — hence why New Hotness vs. Proven Guy fights usually go the way they go, but the why of things kind of got shafted in favour of My Little Pony Cum Jar Project jokes, which is a completely fair trade-off, I believe.
So before I present my idea of how MMA can finally become good, I suppose a disclaimer is in order:
Let’s get the more embarrassing details out of the way.
I am fairly new to the fight game. I became a dedicated combat sports fan only in 2017 after watching the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight. I thought it was shite, and decided to watch the real thing, and thankfully the first Gennady Golovkin vs. Canelo Alvarez fight happened later that same year, exposing me to all the craft, excitement and violence a real high-level fight usually has, and it’s pretty appropriate that it’s also the fight the memory of which has been marred by bullshit judging.
The first UFC event I’ve ever watched was UFC 217, the card that truly had it all: bizarre finishes, disqualifications, violence, high level big brain stuff, belts exchanging hands in a spectacular fashion, and the typical UFC fuckery when it comes to money fights.
You could say that I’ve been spoiled from the beginning — but this early peak also got me legitimately hooked: I became obsessed with combat sports, and I’ve spent two entire years basically doing nothing but studying combat sports and its history in my free time.
I have no formal martial arts or combat sports training beyond receiving instructions from my combat sport athlete relatives and their friends throughout my childhood — I mostly train on my own lonesome in the comfortable seclusion of my village.
I have no formal competition or fighting experience outside of having sparring wars in local meathead gyms or clashing heads with rowdy drunks and hooligans which are dime-a-dozen in Eastern Siberia — as well as neo-nazis and other types of people who are otherwise very quick to take offense at the sight of an Asian man strolling through the streets of a Russian city in the western parts of the country during the time I’ve spent there.
I have no coaching experience or scouting expertise; I am an expert at nothing — what I wish to convey here is an assortment of observations and thoughts that I’ve accrued through watching fights, reading about fights in articles and books written by legitimate experts or educated amateurs, and talking about fights with people more knowledgeable and/or experienced than me — thoughts that have at this point hopefully formed into a somewhat cohesive, systematised base of knowledge.
It is not a comprehensive system, it’s not a fully-formed system, and it is by no means a definitive system. It’s my system.
If I have made myself sound like another one of those online self-defense experts that claim to have a 500-0-0 winning record in street fights — I can assure you this is not the case; I don’t keep count because I’ve been hit too hard way too many times to remember anyway.
If this is a deal-breaker for you regardless — feel free to close this page and disregard whatever it is I’ve shat out in the preceding paragraphs anyway.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about institutions.
The Book of Weaboo Fightan Magic
What MMA lacks, is an institution of MMA.
What exactly do I mean by that? What substantiates an “institution” anyway?
Well, being the smartypants brain genius that I am, I went on Wikipedia to look it up, and Wikipedia says that institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior” — so essentially, a system. A system with a process that works in ways that make sense or at least works according to a certain internal logic. By all rights MMA does fall under all these descriptive terms but it does so in the dumbest, most ass-backwards way that makes guys like me wanna shove a construction pencil up my dick. The second description given in the article says that “Institutions are integrated systems of rules that structure social interactions”. Okay. Not exactly helpful either.
Let’s start from the bottom.
On Episode 22 of the Fight Site’s MMA Podcast we discussed the stupidest, most idiotic, fucking dogshit gameplans that made no sense and made you go “But why? You asshole? You moron? You fucking piece of shit?”.
The focal point of that episode was that all three of us struggled to really come up with anything that didn’t boil down to fighters simply having no gameplans instead of bad ones or at least gameplans that were badly implemented, leaving us with a few select examples instead of like, a list the size of the contract from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” as we had first expected.
And there’s a good reason for that.
MMA has existed for, what? Some 30-odd years? And yet we get guys blaring their horn left-and-right about how this is the Golden Age of MMA, or how PRIDE years were actually the Golden Years despite the fact that the oldest professional MMA fighters are barely over fifty years old. This sport is in its diapers compared to other forms of professional combat. But the reasons why I point out this sport’s youth is a bit different from the usual.
While MMA took a lot of elements from other, more well-established combat sports, and many camps try their damnedest to implement these elements in a way that makes sense, a haphazard approach of throwing shit at a wall and trying to see what sticks is still pretty deeply entrenched in the training process of the vast majority of them. Too many fighters seem to have a tenuous grasp on the fundamentals of fighting — some seem to outright ignore them in favour of having a whole bunch of cool moves they can cycle through in hopes of achieving something meaningful.
There’s no codified, agreed-upon idea of what the fundamentals even are in MMA. Everyone understands that takedown defense is essential but too many camps seem to forget that your footwork and understanding of positioning are your first line of defense when it comes to avoiding being taken down. Everyone knows that “styles make fights” yet scant few coaches seem to approach them in a way that allows for the strengths of your fighter’s style to be emphasised and its weaknesses curtailed through use of careful game planning and strategy.
People’s understanding of the word “gameplan” seems to be all over the place: if you google “Top 10 Worst Gameplans in the History of MMA” what you’d get is a list of examples of bad decision-making during the course of the fight, i.e. bad implementation of a gameplan as opposed to a gameplan that was flawed or unworkable from its conception.
There’s a lot of emphasis on individual techniques and imposing your game — “being the best you” against any given opponent — but not a lot of broad strokes, conceptual Big Picture thinking involved.
So in a true sarcastic, nitpicky asshole fashion, I’ve come up with three messages that I’ve stolen from some evil prick in suit I believe every camp should have stapled to a wall in their gym:
1. Adjustments vs. Rise’n’Grind.
2. The ringcraft, stupid.
3. Don’t forget about defense.
But what do all these things mean?
Let’s wind back a little, and look once again at the question I presented in the beginning of the article:
Where do you want the fight to go, and why do you want it?
As stated before, some fighters and even champions display a disinterest or outright contempt towards this question. A prime example would be someone like Daniel Cormier, whose entire mindset is “I am going to outwork you no matter the phase, position or distance”, which essentially hamstrung his development as a fighter and indeed his entire career by extension.
He never demonstrated a particular desire to adjust from fight to fight save for his duology with Jon Jones and trilogy with Stipe Miocic, both of which he lost. This demonstrates that his aptitude towards adjustments is lacking and that his camp failed to nail down the paths to victory as well as the reasons for why he lost. Jones zeroed in on all of DC’s flaws and used them to dismantle and then eventually finish DC in a comprehensive fashion.
Stipe Miocic meanwhile took a way longer and much clunkier road to find the necessary paths to victory due to his camp’s inability to scout and gameplan effectively, yet the few adjustments he did make have allowed him to violently finish DC in the first rematch, and then pretty convincingly grind DC to a solid, if scrappy decision win, which is something I honestly find hilarious.
The grind was what cost DC these legacy-defining fights. He never adjusted in meaningful or correct ways, and in some cases the adjustments that he did make ended up costing him Ws on his record.
His camp never emphasised ringcraft, which is why most of his fights consist of DC simply walking after his opponent while absorbing ungodly amounts of punishment.
He never knows where he wants to be, which position to take or what distance he wants to stay at, except right in front of his opponent. This resulted in DC having to slug his way through much more messier and grueling fights than necessary, as he was never able to trap his opponent along the fence and cut off their escape routes, which meant he constantly had to follow them like a wind-up toy and eat shots.
The punishment he’s absorbed over the course of his career also brings us back to the point about attribute-reliant games, but in this case what I want to emphasise is his lack of a functional defense. His lack of safe, economical and effective head movement and active guard led to him developing a handsy and foul-prone style of defense that not only threatens his opponents’ eyesight in downright illegal ways but also opens him up to other, frankly more devastating avenues of attack — like for example the body attack, which he absolutely loathes, as he is particularly susceptible to it. It is the sole chink in the armour of what is otherwise a disturbingly tough and durable fighter, and yet here he is, presenting his belly on a platter.
Granted, body shots are still a pretty ephemeral concept in MMA, especially at higher weights, yet DC was facing the two fighters who are smart enough to employ them. Yet another failure to make the correct adjustment due to lack of depth.
Essentially, DC is a failure on all three fundamental levels of development. He’s been doomed as a fighter on a conceptual level. Almost everything he did was wrong.
Sure, he’s made some decent decisions and his game wasn’t completely useless — seeing as he did manage to accrue a fairly respectable winning record — but much of his success was success accomplished despite himself, and against even worse opposition in the two shallowest divisions in the sport.
And yet he’s still got a sizable fan following — proving that the UFC’s marketing campaign designed to label Cormier as one of the greatest mixed martial artists of all time was a success. But this entire endeavour wouldn’t be nearly as successful were it not for the mindset that permeates the sport itself from its very foundation.
Built Different
In MMA, fighters who eschew adjustments in favour of shoving their game down their opponents’ throat while relying heavily on their attributes are lauded while flawed yet introspective competitors like Tony Ferguson are brushed off as being weird for weird’s sake. And while Tony is idiosyncratic and unorthodox, he’s always tried to find elements that work with his style and form a coherent game.
Justin Gaethje recognised that his approach was detrimental to his end goal of becoming a champion, took concrete steps to address it, and yet here we are seeing an army of naysayers banging on about how he’s either no longer exciting, or is still a dumb brawler deep down. A lot of them are essentially just butthurt Tony fans but it’s still a thing, and it shows that most MMA fans are more concerned with reinforcing the hype they’re riding rather than seeing the fighters for what they are.
Which is also ironically what gave Tony the reputation of “a fighter that can do anything” — and now that he’s been beaten with a specific gameplan set to exploit his technical errors and general tendencies, he’s either just a “weirdo who got by on doing weird shit” or a “fraud that fought bums”.
What’s also ironic about this narrative is that Tony’s style that’s built on “weird shit” is actually much more coherent than that of some other fighters’ — their game may be more orthodox yet it does not possess nearly the same level of cohesion and interconnectivity between the tools they utilise. Fighters like Edson Barboza, Donald Cerrone or Kevin Lee, to give some examples — fighters that Tony managed to beat, incidentally enough. It’s always “phases” with these fighters, always something that doesn’t reach nearly the same level of flow or workrate in transition.
The way he’s assembled his arsenal is the exact opposite of what fighters under, say, Mark Henry do. A typical Mark Henry adjustment would be to make someone kick a lot, or give them a wheel kick that they spam every two minutes or so, for no real reason.
People see Tony awkwardly spin into elbows off missed right hands, roll into Imanari attempts off his opponent’s strikes, and call it disjointed when it’s anything but. There is always a method to his madness yet because people tend to brush off unorthodox techniques as “low-percentage” and “wacky” — he’s undeservedly considered to be the epitome of “throwing shit at a wall”.
Dustin Poirier reinvented himself to leverage his athletic advantages in smart, precise ways, but is viewed by many as a barely-literate moron whose only good attribute is being able to punch hard, simply because he’s not a dextrous, flashy kicker — which is an argument that’s been thrown around a lot in the buildup to his fight against Dan Hooker, a fighter who’s not exactly famous for having a diverse arsenal of weapons himself, funnily enough. And since Khabib bulldozed him Dustin is now a braindead banger fit only for phone booth slugfests, waiting to fall off a cliff any second now. His decision-making was undeniably lacking in that fight but since his camp has essentially failed him on every level — from scouting and strategy down to the specific tools he needed to employ, I’d rather go easier on him that I usually do. The guillotines are still pretty fucking stupid, though.
For every major fight, Stipe Miocic added one little thing beyond the two honking fists and a double leg on which he built his humble game, and that little thing allowed him to find success against every single challenger he faced. And that’s pretty much all on his own lonesome, seeing as his camp’s idea of scouting and gameplanning can be summed up as “watch the UFC promo for the fight and let Stipe figure it all out as the fight goes along”. But nevertheless, a not-inconsiderable amount of people see it fit to brush him off as yet another stupid heavyweight clobbering other, even stupider heavyweights — clearly there is nothing to be lauded here.
Don’t we actually want Heavyweight to evolve? Isn’t Stipe a baseline by which all other heavyweights should be judged? The bar is admittedly very low but Stipe Miocic still stands head and shoulders above all other UFC heavyweights and indeed UFC Heavyweight Champions before him.
The common thread running through all these criticisms leveled against legitimately extraordinary fighters is that they are reductive, they are simplistic. Each of these fighters is more than the sum of their parts — an ironclad criteria for nailing down if you’re good or not — and yet people take a single element and run it into the ground to prove that fighter X is a bum, a journeyman, a nothing. This criticism is subtractive, it’s negative, and it’s a criticism done in bad faith — lesser than even error-correction which is the most surface-level type of coaching; it’s useless and holds no substance.
Any idiot can point out that a fighter’s swings are too wide, his hands are too low, his chin is too high, and yet if you ask a person to point out what they think is the reason for this or if it’s at all relevant for the matchup in question, most people’s answer would just be: “it’s, uh, bad, and you can get knocked out”.
Sure, mechanical errors are a pretty undesirable thing to have, but what must happen for the fighter in question to find themselves in a position to get knocked out? What steps will the opponent have to take to corral them in a position where they can knock them out? Which tools and what kind of approach will be needed to exploit these errors?
These are all fundamental questions relating to ringcraft and footwork, the very base and foundation upon which every single fighter in the history of the planet has built their game — something that is often overlooked by damn near everyone involved in the sport — and I’m not even talking about the fans anymore because it’s honestly akin to trying to clean a sewer with a water gun at this point.
It is this anti-intellectual mindset that makes people approach MMA training in fundamentally flawed ways and lends us dozens of prospects with weirdly disjointed, attribute-reliant games that either bank on being able to push a pace not all of these fighters are able to down the stretch, or games that tend to simply fall apart once their opponent figures out the glaring, gaping holes in their arsenal.
You could argue that the examples I’ve described are either not entirely correct, or appropriate, or that all of these fighters possess an assortment of natural advantages — be it incredible toughness or massive knockout power, and by doing so you’d only reinforce my point — the point being that a lot of people who are involved in combat sports do not understand nuance.
Here’s another nuanced opinion: at a sufficient level of athletic, technical and strategic development, leveraging your natural strengths in a correct way takes priority over technical details 9 times out of 10 unless a total parity across all three is somehow achieved, which is something that happens like, once a century.
Remember Fedor?
Y’know, Fedor Emelianenko? The guy who was considered P4P the best MMA fighter in the world when he was at his peak?
Watch a Fedor fight. Any Fedor fight from the early 2000s will do. What would be your first takeaway? When I first watched him fight, my first reaction was “Jesus fucking Christ, this guy is fast”. The second thing I noticed was that he rarely, if ever, looked as if he didn’t know what he was doing or where the fight was going. Fedor had a preternatural grasp on the flow of a fight; he never looked lost.
What do I mean by that?
On a tactical level, Fedor leveraged his crafty, sneaky hand-traps which he used actively and willingly, as well as his takedown threat, in order to let his loopy, weird-looking arcing hooks set up the transition into the takedown where he was able to let loose with ferocious, sickening ground and pound. This was his process: a process he worked through point by point, and this process allowed him to answer the three questions I presented in the very beginning of the article: he knew where the fight would go, why he wanted to be there and how he would get there.
Fedor is an example of an extremely athletically gifted individual with a great grasp of strategy and tactics: he selected and used appropriate techniques that best suited his natural attributes and aptitudes for devastating effect. Sure, some of them were unorthodox. Some of them were mechanically flawed. But he had a system that covered for his technical flaws by leveraging his physical and intellectual gifts in a way that allowed him to decisively win fights.
This is the difference between him and DC: Fedor leveraged his natural gifts in an intelligent way while DC got by on them. DC had all the potential to become the next Fedor, the next Heavyweight great, and he blew it — in part due to his arrogance, in part due to a subpar team, and the state of the divisions he’s fought in — but most of all due to a limited understanding of, and an apparent inability to internalise the fundamentals of Mixed Martial Arts.
But enough about all-time great gatekeepers.
When you look at fighters who are at the top of the heap, legitimate P4P greats, what you’ll find is that most of them are either insanely athletically gifted, or highly intelligent — or in even rarer, downright awe-inspiring cases, sometimes even both. These people select appropriate, complementary techniques that best use their physical or intellectual gifts. These techniques become habits. These habits must be exploited if you wish to stand a chance of beating them.
Jack Slack frequently mentioned in his Killing the King series that he’s reluctant to say that top level fighters possess flaws — they possess habits. I concur. But there is a certain caveat I feel I should mention: there’s like maybe two or three guys off the top of my head where I can say that they truly, legitimately do not possess flaws.
I suppose it’s a question of personal standards and what your personal definition of the word “flaw” is, but aside from Jose Aldo in his prime I feel like we’ve yet to see a champion that doesn’t exhibit some kind of hole in their game. You could point out that Aldo’s historically horrendous weight cut had resulted in him developing a habit of coasting for the last two rounds to conserve his energy, mainly because of the concerns he’s had about his gas tank — which, to be fair, is something no one really managed to strain all that much in any meaningful way aside from Chad Mendes in a valiant, if losing effort, and then eventually Max Holloway, twice over — and even then Max had to utilise his entire strategic and technical arsenal paired with sheer, bloody-minded grit in order to accomplish it.
But the reason why I believe that is that I feel like a systematic, procedural way of approaching MMA isn’t considered to be standard. Every great champion like George St-Pierre, Jose Aldo, Fedor Emelianenko tended to be an outlier during their era, much like Volkanovski is probably the sole reigning champion of the modern times that approaches fighting in the exact same way.
Very Technical, Like A Computer or a Chess Match or Two People Punching Each Other in the Face
You could argue that it’s unfair to expect the same level of fighting acumen from all fighters regardless of calibre. That much is true. But what you can expect, and in fact what you should demand, is the same level of fighting acumen from all camps and coaches who consider themselves world-class.
I tend to be much more heavy handed with my criticism when it comes to coaches as opposed to fighters. Yes, it’s a hard job, it’s a tough job, and it’s a job that requires putting aside your own priorities and even your personal life in some cases — and it doesn’t matter; the fighter should be the sole focus of an ideal coach.
We don’t live in an ideal world however: you can’t just take ideas that were cooked up in a vacuum, throw them around willy-nilly, and expect them to just work — context and nuance make the planet spin. But there is a reason why standards exist.
Yes, a lot of them are arbitrary, unreasonable or no longer reflect reality — standards are something that someone just decided should be that way, and then only years upon years of tradition have turned it into something that’s considered par for the course. Standards can also evolve and change, or be discarded and replaced with something else, something better.
The bottom line is that you have to have a gauge block by which you judge things, because you can’t just accept literally any kind of shit on a case by case basis simply because “it just depends” — it’s unfeasible, and borders on the kind of nihilistic, scatterbrained relativism I personally tend to despise, so I use the best of the best as my personal gauge block. Which is why I do not believe that we live in the Golden Age of MMA, nor that we’ve already lived through it. We have people setting up bars for their divisions but only a select few of them set up a bar on a level I believe should be considered the gold standard.
And since the UFC tries to present itself as the MMA leader, and the place where the absolute best fighters on the planet clash, I reserve the right to judge them and everyone else involved with the organisation very harshly.
There is an alarming lack of strategic thinking and emphasis on process in a lot of modern MMA camps, and camps that are supposedly built around those ideas tend to have a narrow, limited understanding of these concepts. Jackson-Wink and Tristar have a reputation of MMA think tanks with wizard head coaches that have a laser-accurate ability to scout their opponents while minimising damage for their fighters yet these days they tend to ruin fighters by trying to squeeze a square peg through a round hole more often than not.
For the most recent example I would suggest you take a look at Kevin Lee. You’d think he’s the ideal candidate for the Tristar system of “You are GSP now” because of his background, set of skills and build — namely, ludicrous wingspan for a person of his height and wrestling ability — attributes which on the surface mirror that of George St-Pierre’s.
Yet if anything it feels like his pre-existing ability was curtailed as Tristar really likes maintaining their own personal idea of control over the fight: I jab, I take you down if you strike, I strike if you try to take me down. If one element goes down — other elements soon follow, because a failure to implement one phase is frequently interpreted as a monumental failure to implement the System by most Tristar fighters, and Kevin Lee has always been very susceptible to outsmarting himself.
The ghost of Georges St-Pierre seems to haunt that gym, and every fighter there seems to either consciously or subconsciously emulate the P4P great, and they never quite manage to come into their own as a result.
The bottom line is that these camps get caught up in the details, in the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts stuff, as opposed to consulting with the general principles of fighting and molding their fighters according to their own personal attributes, pre-existing skill sets and aptitudes. They’ve come up with a process that works only for a select few fighters with the correct build, mindset and the number of aptitudes, witnessed their star fighters succeed by utilising this process, and decided to use it as a one-size-fits-all model.
This brings us to the topic of process and fighting systems.
Let’s put on our Nutty Professor hat back on and look at what I mean by process:
A fighter's process is a complex of ideally complementary techniques that they use in tandem with their fundamentals such as ringcraft and footwork in order to win the fight.
Pay close attention to the wording I’ve used: “ideally complementary techniques”. Finding techniques that work for you takes time and there’s always going to be something that could be more appropriate or done better. Perfect tends to be the enemy of good in normal life and it’s the same with combat sports: coaches don’t have infinite time to iron out every single kink their fighter has even though they’d probably really love to — if they’re a good coach, that is — and the law of diminishing returns never ceases to be a thing even then. Good prioritisation in training is the one of the fundamental signs of a good camp.
The bottom line here is that these techniques can be literally anything, depending on a fighter’s build, attributes, personality and aptitude. What's good for one fighter could be poisonous for another, and vice-versa.
Which is precisely why I dislike labeling techniques “good” or “bad”, or “low-percentage” and “high-percentage” outside of a few select cases where it makes sense to do so. Context reigns supreme here as it does everywhere else. Techniques aren’t inherently good or bad, they’re either effective or ineffective on a case by case basis — or rather “appropriate” or “inappropriate” because if you’re smart enough and good enough damn near anything goes in a fight. That’s why the term “shot selection” is a thing.
A fighter’s grasp of the technique can be bad, but it doesn’t suddenly render the technique itself useless. Just because a whole bunch of fighters with rudimentary volume jabs got cross-countered to death over the course of combat sports history it doesn’t mean it’s pointless or dangerous to jab.
Conversely, a move can be “low-percentage” but the threat of it can completely change the face of a fight. You might not land every jumping knee, lead uppercut or wheel kick you throw, but if an opponent knows you have it and are willing to use it, it can potentially take a lot of options out of their toolbox.
Having an internalised process is what separates the best from the merely good a lot of the time — these fighters don’t just throw stuff in order to just land something, there’s always an understanding of what works off what. But that alone is not a guarantee of success: fundamentals, as always, play a key role here.
Before answering the question of “How?”, first you must answer the “Where?” and “Why?”.
Someone like Calvin Kattar always knows how he’s going to win but he never seems to know where it’s going to happen, or why it should happen in that spot exactly. He always fights as though his coaches never scout his opponents for him, and as a result he’s forced to spend for up to 7 minutes trying to figure out what to do. Calvin Kattar looks lost for more than a round, and when a fighter of his calibre looks like he doesn’t know what to do for more than three entire minutes, I start getting angry.
Calvin Kattar is a supremely technically gifted fighter with beautiful mechanics who’s never internalised the understanding of when and where you should use those, thus ruining a potentially championship level fighter. He’s got mechanically sound footwork, good defensive instincts, his punching form is gorgeous, and he’s crafty enough on his own once his brain finishes booting up — but all these things essentially exist in a vacuum for a good portion of most fights he’s in because he never seems to know in which direction he wants the fight to go.
His process is backwards: because his coaches never asked him the question of where he never got to why, and as a result his ringcraft is essentially non-existent — which in turn put a ceiling on the development of his footwork. And because his footwork, while mechanically sound, is constricted by his lack of ringcraft, we saw him get pieced up by Zabit Magomedsharipov on the backfoot for two and a half rounds because Calvin can’t pressure, and then we saw him get pressured to the fence himself by Jeremy Stephens of all fucking people.
And what drives me nuts here is that a fighter as technically proficient as Kattar must be able to do these things based purely on his mechanics alone. He has all the tools. But he just doesn’t use them efficiently because either his coaches or Kattar himself do not possess the wherewithal to make a conscious decision to commit to a gameplan, or indeed come up with a gameplan ahead of time — something that every single camp must do, it’s literally one of their main functions — constricting what should have been a title challenger to the status of a Top 5 threat and nothing more.
Kattar’s situation kind of makes you wonder if it’s even worth trying to develop textbook-perfect technique and body mechanics if you aren’t even going to use them. A professional fighter has limited time to develop, round out their style and become successful — and there’s just so much to learn and master and understand.
And all this time and effort — the literal thousands of hours spent in the gym and in your free time, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of repetitions, until the motions are hardwired into your nervous system and your body just starts acting on its own without you even realising it sometimes — all this time and effort, and all you end up being is an occasional main event header?
No Olympian ever got to the Games thinking: “Oh well, I guess I’m gonna try and give a good account of myself, I’ll settle for the 4th place, that’d be pretty cool I suppose”. And no pro fighter of Kattar’s calibre would ever feel complete unless he gets to the title and bleeds for it. Coaches need to take this seriously, and I don’t think Kattar’s coaches did.
At the end of the day, Calvin Kattar ends up being just an unusually technically proficient action fighter. A guy that just does cool shit, I guess. And that just bums the hell out of me.
But speaking of action fighters that do cool shit, this brings us back to Justin Gaethje and Tony Ferguson — the two dumb sluggers that could.
Champ Shit Only
For the better part of their careers both Tony and Justin excelled as insanely violent pressure fighters. The goal of both was to break you — they’d stay in your face and basically just beat the everloving mother of fuck outta you until you were so fucked up you couldn’t provide any meaningful resistance and either got all the blood squeezed out of your face or most of your brain cells dispersed into the atmosphere with a nuclear warhead of a punch.
And while the way both went about doing their business would strike many people as only slightly removed from a caveman clobbering a monkey over the head with rock for a banana, interestingly enough both answered essentially all of the questions I want the fighters to answer!
Where do I want the fight to go? I’m gonna pressure my guy to the fence.
Why? Cuz I have shitty eyesight and an opponent that’s moving backwards is much less offensively potent — which is great since I wanna stay within striking range where I can either feel the strikes with my guard or try and see them coming. It also cuts the time I need to make reads in half because I’m the one making stuff happen while my opponent is more concerned about a crazy person closing in on them.
How? Well if I’m Justin Gaethje I’m gonna use the threat of my hitting power and my cage-cutting footwork to cut off escape routes and blast leg kicks to limit my opponent’s mobility. And then use the threat of my hitting power to actually hit him lots. I’m also a big bad D1 wrestler which makes people go “nuh uh, not wrestling that guy” cuz scouting in MMA is a joke and credentials is the only thing everyone pays attention to.
But I actually really am strong as shit, that’s true, so it might not be a good idea to wrestle with me anyway.
And if I’m Tony Ferguson I’m just gonna slam jabs into my opponent and keep exchanging with him while walking right at him to make him not wanna hang around in front of me for too long because I am immortal and can take what’s coming at me. If stuff gets too heated I can always grab my guy and snap him down anyways cuz I’m also a really scary finish-oriented grappler and that tends to unnerve people a lot.
I’m being only slightly facetious here because this approach is genuinely not really all that complicated — but then, the best ones usually aren’t.
They both have a process and most if not all of their tools are appropriate to their style and nothing in their arsenal — not even Tony’s more “exotic” attacks — stick out as particularly incongruent with what they seek to accomplish.
You could say that their approach was more attribute-reliant than attribute-leveraging and in a certain sense you’d be right except both have demonstrated underrated craft time and again during the course of their careers, and both have gotten a lot better at using their attributes rather than getting by on them.
The topic of their styles and the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts details have been examined and explored in-depth elsewhere, such as in Josh Yandle’s and Dan Albert’s articles on Justin Gaethje, and by Danny, Sriram and Haxxorized in episodes 10 and 13 of the Fight Site’s MMA Podcast where they’ve talked a lot about Tony Ferguson’s progression as a fighter.
What I mean to do next now that we’ve established their similarities is to explore how their progression differed according to my own criteria.
While both fighters answered the first set of my questions succinctly and successfully, we also have to look at how they go about working within the three parameters I’ve outlined earlier.
To reiterate, the three parameters were:
Adjustments vs. Grind.
Ringcraft.
Defense.
It used to be that both tended to lean heavily on the grind side of things, and whatever adjustments they tended to make were tactical rather than strategic, meaning they made incremental adjustments mid-fight rather than from fight to fight.
Justin Gaethje’s ringcraft was decidedly more focused and positioning-based when compared to Tony’s but he frequently had his own dangerous lapses in judgement — to be fair most of them were usually borne out of overeagerness or mechanical wonkiness rather than fundamental issues with his footwork on a conceptual level. And when it comes to Tony, some of his wackier moves probably wouldn’t have worked if his ringcraft wasn’t the way it is. It’s all subject for debate regardless.
Defensively, Gaethje comes off in a more flattering light, seeing as his defense stood the test of essentially a career’s worth of crazy wars. Sure, he got hurt a lot, but way less than one could expect from a man who spent most of his fighting years right in the thick of it. Hence why I feel comfortable saying that his defense was appropriate to his desired style of pressure and did its job reasonably well.
Tony meanwhile is a more complicated and strange case — as is everything else about him, really. He always seemed to need a much slower start than Justin because he needed for upwards of an entire round to make his reads, sometimes by way of essentially eating everything his opponent threw at him — as if his face is some kind of tactile analogue-input interface, after which he’d shred his opponents to pieces. Tony is woefully defensively irresponsible and vulnerable at times only to then seem untouchable and unkillable later on.
So why did Justin win? We could go on about the footwork, the ringcraft, the details of their style but it’s way beyond the scope of this article. I would like to emphasise one final thing, though.
Both used to lean on the grindy side of things. One of them no longer does.
And this brings us to the topic of… uh…
Abjudgement? Adjustmentability? Abreast? No, that doesn’t sound right.
Adroit?
The topic of Justin’s technical turnaround has been done to death and I’m not gonna spend too much time prattling on about it. The bottom line is that this strategic and tactical shift won him the fight, and that’s final.
Wittman zeroed in on Justin’s attributes, quirks and aptitudes, and turned him into a distance-based counterpuncher — as it turned out, arguably an even more poisonous matchup for Tony Ferguson than a hyper-violent pressure fighter.
Justin circa UFC 249 answered all of the fundamental questions I’ve asked, and more.
He wanted to stay on the outside because Tony only attacks on straight lines. He wanted to attack his positioning and square him up because his footwork is, fundamentally, kind of a mess. He used the threat of his hitting power to prevent Tony from snowballing by cracking him with right hands and leg kicks every single time he entered range while maintaining advantageous angles and superior positions, and he kept closing the door on every exchange with a thudding left hook. He not only limited exchanges by leveraging his power in an intelligent way but also started and, more importantly, ended most of them on his own terms.
Wittman orchestrated Gaethje’s stylistic adjustment without taking away Justin’s main attributes: the threats of power and violence.
He ordered Gaethje to make a tactical adjustment (“Take 10% off your shots, you’re trying to kill him”) mid-fight and got him back on track after the knockdown in round 2, and continued to zero Justin in on key details he needed to keep in mind in order to maintain control over the course of the fight.
Gaethje’s ringcraft proved superior to Tony’s due to his understanding of positioning: Justin constantly attacked Tony’s positioning without commiting to strikes or clear leads, opting instead to feint Tony out of his shorts in between twatting him across the dome with cruise missiles.
And finally, while it could still be much tighter, Justin demonstrated markedly improved defense: he used preemptive and reactive head movement, never lost track of his preferred distance, and pretty much stayed defensively responsible throughout the fight safe for one big dumb moment of big dumbess when he attempted what was apparently a shoryuken.
Time will tell if Justin will successfully combine his previous style with this new approach into something complementary and even more dangerous but so far the tandem of Wittman and Gaethje is one of the few examples of fighter/coach pairings whose methodology fits my criteria of a cohesive fighting system.
Petr Yan is another example of a fighter like that but I don’t wanna turn this bloated monster of an article into something even more grotesque by stitching some more examples on top of it when this one was illustrative enough.
Time to wrap this up.
Big Think
This thing took a lot more time to come up with than the two previous installments of the Meat-Packing series because I actually wanted to write something additive rather than subtractive which is what I feel I did when I bitched about all the dumb bullshit that pissed me off in the UFC.
What I think I ended up doing in the end is give context as to why all the dumb bullshit pisses me off. Eh, close enough.
The end of Part II had the following statement in the end:
Both Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje are simultaneously exemplars and outliers for the UFC model and typical MMA fighter progression, and I plan on extrapolating what I mean by that in the next installment of the UFC’s Meat-Packing Plant series.
And in the process of writing precisely that more and more questions kept popping up in my head about MMA as a sport, the inner workings of MMA as an entertainment industry, its politics, and then it kind of dawned on me that I won’t be able to move directly from matchmaking to fighter progression without first outlining what is essentially the entirety of my views when it comes to the whole racket.
So basically I did zero writing for four whole months until a lightbulb turned on in the empty cavity I call the inside of my skull right as I finished watching Edmen Shahbazyan get his dome embedded inside the canvas.
As I pointed in the beginning of the article, most of my annoyance with MMA stems from a lack of an institution of MMA.
And by that I mean the current culture of it, the culture and customs of the state that is MMA in the world of combat sports, is still completely disorganised — and as such there’s an overwhelming amount of stupid bullshit in the sport: incompetent judges, incompetent corners, the greedy protection racket that is the UFC, the list goes on and on and on, and it can become pretty demoralising to think about.
But the sport is still young — young enough that the direction of its development can still be changed. And I want to at least draw a rough outline of how it can be changed, and it’s a goal that my friends at the Fight Site all contribute towards in one way or another — no matter how insignificant they believe their contributions to be.
But “the Institute of MMA” is such an expansive topic to cover.
It concerns corporate politics, workplace relations, job security, job culture, actual culture, the concepts of fandom and moral hazard — and while thinking about all this, I couldn’t help but feel deflated in front of my computer, staring at a blank page in Google Docs day in, day out. It felt like I bit off way more than I could chew. So I decided to start from the very bottom, from the very core of the endeavour: fighting itself.
I believe I’ve done a decent enough job.
To nail the point home:
A fighter must know where they want the fight to go. That either means pressuring, going on the backfoot or standing your ground in the centre — picking the right distance and direction is essential.
A fighter must know why they want the fight to go there. What are your strengths? What are your opponent’s weaknesses? Plan accordingly.
A fighter must understand how they’re going to accomplish that. They have to evaluate the tools in their arsenal, pick the ones that are suited for their goal, and plan accordingly.
Adjustments trump mindless grind as long as they are correct. That means good decision making wins fights and preparation is key. Deciding to grind your opponent out by leveraging your physicality is also an adjustment, provided it’s used in the right context.
Ringcraft wins fights. This ties into the very first point: know where you want to be and where you want your opponent to go. First you attack your opponent’s positioning by utilising your footwork. Then you attack your opponent.
Defense doesn’t win fights but it prevents you from losing. Good defense in one fight may prevent you from losing but it may also prevent you from losing your next fight, and the one after that. By staying defensively responsible at all times, you prolong your career, and open new avenues of attack. The best defense is the one that allows you to consistently attack your opponent as often as humanly possible.
Preparation wins fights. It’s non-negotiable. That doesn’t mean drilling your kicks like a maniac 24/7. It means planning accordingly. A well-executed gameplan may allow a much less technically or athletically gifted fighter to beat what is on paper a superior opponent. Leveraging your natural gifts and strengths in an intelligent way is the foundation of good gameplanning and is the essence of good fighting.
These are the fundamental principles of fighting every single fighter and every single coach must understand and internalise. They may sound like clichéd truisms but they are irrefutably, undeniably, the only “rules” of fighting out there. After thousands of years of history of the fighting arts, and thousands of years into the future, these principles will always remain the same, provided we don’t, like, undergo a species-wide mutation and turn into grub monsters.
Even then grub monsters will probably have their own individual strengths and weaknesses… and combat sports, I guess.
I wish to extend my sincere thanks to all who contributed to this article in one way or another, whether deliberately or otherwise.
The first order of thanks goes to Haxxorized, whose input was invaluable in helping me formulate and outline my thoughts. Moreover, Haxx contributed by providing examples of fighters that represent the concepts I wished to discuss. The way he talks about fighting and many other things in general has helped me organise and formulate my own thoughts on this topic.
I wish to thank Danny Martin and Sriram Muralidaran for letting me come on their podcast — the discussion we’ve had on the episode had essentially jump-started this article after four months of zero progress. Read Danny’s Metagame series: it’s basically required reading if you want to understand what you’re watching. Any breakdown written by Sriram offers something that can enrich your understanding of fighting. Read their stuff. If you don’t, you’ll remain forever dumber for it.
Direct credit goes to Lukasz Fenrych for his input on fighting techniques which made me reassess and recontextualise some of my understanding of them as a concept.
Thanks to all my internet buddies with whom I always have a grand old time whenever we talk about fights, life, relationships, games, food and literally anything else. You’re all great, and I consider you my real friends in spite of the great distance between us.
But most of all, my biggest thanks goes to the person who helped me pull through these weird and strange four months during which I couldn’t help but aimlessly wring my hands, fill my own head with doubts, and gnaw at myself for the littlest things on a daily basis. You know who you are. I love you.
The plan is to dive deeper into the seedy underbelly of MMA and grab a fistfull of its smelly, smelly guts and put them under the lights for all to see, but I’d rather not make any more obnoxiously self-assured statements because it’s a big-ass topic and I may get sidetracked with something else yet again.
This thing took a lot of brainpower out of me so whatever I write next probably won’t be as hefty. Or long.
So. Stay tuned.
Dakhin ulzytra, bayartai.
To Be Continued in Part IV.