MMA Metagame: A Case Study of Will Brooks
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
In my previous MMA Metagame article, I discussed the difficulty behind prioritizing training for the sake of a fighter’s specific context, and the tenuous relationship fighters have with training every piece of their game equally. This entry in the series is slightly different, because I will be using former Bellator champion Will Brooks as a case study for a lot of the previous talking points I’ve discussed.
Almost three years ago, the former Bellator lightweight champion stood, shaking his head in disbelief at a third consecutive stoppage loss to an underdog. The former champion’s opponent wasn’t some debutant with potential or a top 10 contender in a cutthroat division. He was a sparring partner of the former champion, one with a clear physical ceiling, but a unique kind of savvy and awareness for the man in front of him. In Sydney, Australia, Will Brooks suffered his third and final defeat under the UFC banner before washing out of the promotion he was so desperate to compete in.
How did this happen? How did one of most exceptional talents outside of the UFC crash and burn so badly just 8 years into his career? Sure, it may’ve been a tall ask for Brooks to win titles in two organizations the way his predecessor, Eddie Alvarez did. There was likely still room for Brooks in the upper echelon of the lightweight division, though, since he made it clear that nobody in Bellator’s lightweight division had much to offer him. He left the organization with a 9-1 record, his only loss being to Saad Awad, which Brooks avenged later that year. Four wins in four title fights. He entered the UFC with a shiny 17-1 record.
In 2017, I wrote one of my first combat sports articles ever on Will Brooks, and admittedly, I was quite excited about him. I thought I was looking at a real shot in the arm for the UFC lightweight elite. As it turned out, I was staring down the barrel of MMA’s most puzzling prospect burnouts. For years after his release from the UFC, I was confused and saddened by Will Brooks’ fate in the big show, in part because I could never determine exactly what the problem was that caused such a catastrophic derailment.
Today, I am seeking to rectify that fact as I explore the American Top Team alum’s rise and fall and attempt to nail down exactly what went wrong for the former champion. With a healthy amount of both intrigue and heartbreak, this is the curious case of Willie Love Brooks.
Section 1: Slick & Subversive
A lot of Will Brooks’ heightened reputation was built off the backs of two successive victories over Michael Chandler. To provide a bit of context, Chandler himself became a notable name in the MMA world when he upset Eddie Alvarez in a Fight of the Year contest to win the Bellator title merely nine fights into his professional career. Alvarez would eventually win the title back via split decision in another terrific bout against Chandler, but the lesson was clear: Michael Chandler was an elite talent. With certain bookies marking Will as a high as a +800 underdog against ‘Iron’ Mike, it seemed like a far cry for Brooks to contend with the more proven commodity.
Brooks’ first fight against Michael Chandler (for the interim Bellator lightweight title) is a pretty instructive one for him stylistically. Against a hyper-athletic, hyper-aggressive wrestler-boxer without a ton of subtlety, Brooks demonstrated his thoughtful process as a fighter over 25 minutes, as well as his dubious tendency to taking risks lightly in the early going.
Chandler may not be any sort of thoughtful pressure fighter and his entries are usually big, committed explosions with punches, but the oddsmakers were expecting his powerhouse wrestling to overwhelm Brooks. At least in the early going, that wasn’t a bad assessment.
Part of what drew me to Will Brooks was something that also cost him quite badly later in his career. Brooks’ game didn’t consist of pressing any sort of systematic advantage, so much as figuring out and answering the threats of his opponents. Will Brooks wasn’t an enforcer, he was a responder. This made him a truly special fighter to watch over 25 minutes, in which an observer could witness Brooks actively building his own attack strategy on the fly, but it also meant that Brooks would always find himself in bad positions early, almost daring opponents to do their worst as he gathered information.
The next time Chandler backed Brooks up to the fence, Brooks’ ring-awareness already looked better. He knew when to flatten his stance out, and he angled off the fence as soon as Chandler shot in. Reminiscent of Eddie Alvarez’s strategy in his second fight with Chandler.
Brooks also began figuring out that Chandler’s attempts to scramble back to his feet consisted of turning belly-down and turtling. In the second round, Brooks took advantage of this tendency, and in the third round, he absolutely brutalized Chandler for it.
Chandler continued to go belly-down in attempting to scramble back to his feet, so Brooks started transitioning from both hooks to a body triangle to a high mount. His top control looked particularly nasty in this fight, as well.
As far as I can tell, Brooks isn’t much of a strategic fighter himself, meaning he doesn’t appear to be an enormously studied fighter when preparing for opponents. In general, most of what Brooks decides to do in a fight is informed by his opponent, which is part of the reason why he typically ended his title fights in more control than he began them. The inherent risk in this sort of free-form approach is that Brooks wound up losing rounds and positions, sometimes quite badly, as he computed an opponent’s data. He lacked the sort of defensive depth and parenthetical offense of Robbie Lawler, who exercised a similar approach, but executed more safely.
The first metagame article I ever wrote was about strategic preparation and tactical efficacy upending ostensible depth of skill in many cases at the highest levels of the sport. Will Brooks stands alone as one of the most unique strategic fighters I’ve ever seen in MMA, since his entire approach is seemingly built off of the looks that opponents give him. As his career progressed, this real-time approach to building a fight led to margins of error that Brooks simply wasn’t prepared for.
If this is an accurate assessment of Will Brooks’ approach to fighting, then it makes perfect sense why he managed to blow Michael Chandler out of the water in their rematch. After five full rounds of growing accustomed to his opponent’s timing and tactical patterns, Brooks keyed in on some of the holes in Chandler’s game, meaning he didn’t have to spend nearly as long building an attack strategy. From the outset, Brooks constantly switched to southpaw, permitting the open-side body kick and the jab became his most consistently effective weapon towards intercepting Chandler’s entries.
Chandler was more measured in his attempt to shoot takedowns while Brooks was near the fence, but it allowed Brooks to escape the fence more consistently with a darting jab.
As the fight progressed, Brooks found himself on the winning end of wrestling and clinch exchanges more and more, as Chandler stubbornly kept pursuing takedowns in vain. That said, it was still a fairly reactive fight from Brooks, as his approach was entirely informed by his opponent and he still spent long stretches of time defending takedowns along the fence. The only reason a finish materialized for Brooks was because Chandler made a comically bad decision in a clinch exchange.
Brooks pressured in from the underhook and wrist control. Chandler attempted an uchi mata, but his hips were too high so he couldn’t load Brooks’ weight onto his back. He was still able to create a barrier to move him over, and then the hook on the leg elevated him and forced his weight forward. This was more of a mechanical error from Chandler, but Brooks did a good job posting and staying high once they hit the mat. The right hand on the break led to the bizarre finish.
Watching it now, I can see more of the technical flaws present in Brooks than I could back in 2017. Responding to and overcoming opponents over 25 minutes is an impressive game if you can play it, but this philosophy is somewhat reliant on the pieces of your game being polished and effective enough to respond to various threats with consistency. I just recently wrote an article on the importance of prioritization in a fighter’s skillset, and Will Brooks demonstrated some of the problems that a well-rounded approach can bring with it. He was a capable fighter everywhere, but the pieces of his game didn’t fit together as cohesively as they should’ve and he was lacking distinct depth in most areas. Here are a few examples of what I found:
Brooks’ awareness along the fence is good, but his technical ringcraft is sorely lacking. He relied too much on pure footspeed to carry him out of bad positions, and he couldn’t cut tight angles off the fence consistently. He also backs out of exchanges in a straight line and can be timed on exits.
Brooks’ jab was sharp and accurate, but it lacked variance. He couldn’t feint effectively enough with it to systematically open up more exchanges, and the punch was only ever delivered at one speed to one target. The jab is is a multifaceted tool designed to build, but Brooks’ application of his own jab was limiting.
Brooks’ awareness in exchanges was sound, but it masked a lack of defensive depth in the pocket. Often, he would rely on exaggerated slips and rolls that occasionally put him further out of position. There were more problem present in his defense beyond his hands simply being low, but he often parked his hands at his waist, which didn’t help his cause.
Brooks’ balance and grip-fighting was improved, but nowhere near as consistent as it should’ve been. For as fluid a top position threat as Brooks proved to be against Chandler (replete with a crossface from high mount to create space, opening up ground-&-pound), Brooks lacked a consistent defensive clinch system. He also lacked urgency in tie ups. More on this later.
Now, as I said before, a well-rounded approach has its merits, particularly when a champion is preparing to handle a variety of different opponents. Given the position that Brooks was occupying in 2014-2015, it is hard to fault him for playing to these strengths. The problem is that, if a fighter is going to play a game that basically requires opponents to lay out their entire strategy in front of them, this fighter must possess the depth of skill in any of the necessary areas to continue applying layers on an opponent until the opponent is outmatched. A lot of those layers were absent from Brooks’ game, which meant that against smarter, deeper and more crafty opponents, Will had a preternaturally difficult time determining which areas he owned a decided, consistent advantage against.
Section 2: A War on Two Fronts
Brooks earned his title shot by winning the Bellator lightweight tournament in 2013, but he was only granted an interim title shot against Michael Chandler instead of Eddie Alvarez because the latter got injured during training camp for the rubber match. For those who don’t know, Eddie was under tremendous contract pressures of his own, which relegated him to the sidelines for an entire year in 2013. Even after he beat Chandler to win back the lineal Bellator title, Rebney & Co. demanded that Alvarez grant Chandler a third fight before his contract ran out. A third fight never materialized, and Alvarez (though still technically the organization’s champion) was ultimately released from his contract by current Bellator owner, Scott Coker.
Brooks stepped in and took Eddie’s place on a week’s notice, which probably explains the absurd odds. The bout was meant to be a bounceback title win for Chandler, thus guaranteeing him a rubber match with the then-lineal champion Eddie Alvarez, since Chandler would be the incumbent interim champion. Then the fight happened, and despite the dodgy decision, Brooks performed well above all expectations and walked out of the Landers Center at Bellator 120 with the belt wrapped around his waist. The fight came together as an accident, but it wound up being a blessing for Will.
Bjorn Rebney did not see it that way. The Bellator brass clearly did not want Will Brooks as their champion, nor did they like it at all when he won the first fight against Chandler. They were so transparently opposed to Brooks as their champion that following Brooks’ title win, Bjorn Rebney stated that Eddie Alvarez would have a choice to fight either Will Brooks or to complete the trilogy with a then 0-2 Michael Chandler.
Needless to say, Brooks felt slighted and disrespected by the blatant favoritism displayed by Rebney, and frankly, it’s hard to blame him.
All shady contract dealings aside, Brooks’ frustration was palpable. Through no fault of his own, the organization he was signed to was fully prepared to bench him in favor of a more promotionally significant fight. This entire controversy wasn’t even the only time the Bellator brass actively sought out to sabotage a fighter’s career. When the second fight between Chandler and Brooks concluded and Chandler had officially lost three title fights in a row, Bellator’s promotional plans for their golden boy went up in flames and the chasm between Brooks and Bellator grew even wider. Two title wins later, and Brooks’ contract was mercifully up. As luck would have it, the UFC had noticed Brooks’ extensive championship success and scooped him up as soon as he became a free agent.
Unfortunately for Brooks, his forthright dissatisfaction with his former promotion came back to bite him. In such a desperate attempt to abandon Bellator, Brooks shot himself in the foot regarding UFC contract bargaining. Will made it abundantly clear that he had no interest in re-signing with Bellator after his victory over Marcin Held, but without a competitive organization vying to sign him, he was also left with nowhere else to go. The UFC is no stranger to taking advantage of fighter contracts, and they wound up lowballing Brooks so badly that he settled for a terrible contract relative to his prestigious reputation.
The Nevada Athletic Commission disclosed Will Brooks’ pay against Ross Pearson as a measly $50,000 to show, $50,000 to win. Considering how decorated a champion Brooks was in Bellator, combined with his wins over Michael Chandler (who had wound up with the lightweight title yet again), Brooks could’ve conceivably negotiated for double what he settled for. For the sake of comparison, Gray Maynard fought on the same card that Brooks debuted on, and despite ending the night with a 1-4 record, he still wound up making $111,000.
Maybe Brooks’ negotiation tactics had nothing to do with his competitive burnout, but it is relevant surrounding information nonetheless.
Section 3: A Sputtering Start
In every one of his four UFC fights, something looked off about Will Brooks. His first fight was against a tough company man in Ross Pearson, who most predicted would be something of a comfortable welcome into the UFC for Brooks. Out of all four of Brooks’ UFC appearances, this fight objectively went the best for him, but it was far from the earth-shattering debut he was looking for.
Pearson possessed a basic understanding of feints, which caused Brooks to shoot takedowns from way outside. Considering how easily Evan Dunham managed to outwrestle Pearson, this was concerning from the jump. Pearson pinned Brooks to the cage a few times with double underhooks, which was even more concerning.
Watching Brooks struggle to physically overpower Ross Pearson was immediately a strange visual, especially considering how effective Brooks was in fending off a physical beast in Michael Chandler just two years prior. Some have speculated that this was purely a size issue, in which Brooks never had to face anybody larger than himself. Despite Chandler’s horsepower, Brooks was still comfortably the taller and longer man. This was part of the issue, but not all of it.
I mentioned earlier that Brooks was best categorized as a responder, as opposed to an enforcer. Brooks garnered a reputation as an excellent wrestler in his own right, but as I pointed out in the Chandler fights, much of Brooks’ own wrestling was bred through a series of tactical errors on the part of Chandler. Looking back on his career, Will never possessed a particularly deep offensive wrestling game of his own accord. He couldn’t set up level-changes with feints particularly well, and he only hit a few reactive shots when an exhausted Chandler doggedly overcommitted on an entry. The rest of Brooks’ Bellator wrestling success was usually supplemented by his physicality, in which he could just power through opponents who didn’t have much to their defensive wrestling.
This being the case, the Pearson fight demonstrates some of the problems with that approach. As a pocket boxer with a respectable amount of craft, Pearson wasn’t overcommitting against Brooks and his first layer of takedown defense was quite solid. Instead of running Brooks down with the same predictable entry again and again, Pearson managed to draw Brooks into a ranged striking battle just by not giving him a lot for free.
Ross picked up on Brooks’ limited head movement, so he began feinting before entering with a left hook to catch Brooks leaning all the way off his rear hip.
Pearson also gave Brooks issues by disincentivizing his one-speed, one-target jab. Ross would attempt to slip inside or outside, jab with Brooks, or counter the jab. The more Brooks leaned on it, the easier it became for Pearson to read it.
In effect, Brooks was forced into a very strange fight with Ross Pearson for 15 minutes. Pearson wasn’t giving Brooks a lot to adapt to on the feet, and even he went to lengths to take away the responder’s weapons. The takedowns weren’t available for Brooks, because Pearson was feinting effectively, forcing Brooks to shoot from way outside. Brooks didn’t have any sort of reliable weapon against Pearson, leaning more and more on his length and speed to paper over the holes in his defense. Brooks wound up winning a volume-based potshotting contest, not exactly resembling the venomous grappler and scrambler of yore.
After a close victory over Pearson that didn’t exactly set the world on fire, the UFC brass likely pumped the brakes on any potential main event slots for Brooks. Instead, his next step up was a strange one in Alex ‘Cowboy’ Oliveira, a humongous lightweight (if you could even call him that) who possessed very little in the way of technique, but attempted to make up for it with instincts and raw physicality. Looking back on it, the matchmaking here was weirdly predatory. It was a high risk, low reward fight for Brooks, in which he was massively outsized and fighting someone in Oliveira who would eventually wind up as a decently-sized welterweight.
To add insult to injury, Oliveira missed weight by a whopping 5.5 pounds for the fight. Unlike a lot of fighters who miss weight by a half pound or so, Oliveira clearly didn’t bother trying that hard to get the weight off in the first place. It was a scenario in which Alex probably realized that he wouldn’t be able to make 155 in time, so he just bit the bullet, took the 30% hit to his paycheck, and came into the fight with a sizable advantage in weight. Unsportsmanlike? Sure, but a savvy veteran maneuver all the same. (John Lineker mastered this technique during his stint at flyweight.) In the end, it was still on Brooks to beat him. Hypothetically, Brooks could’ve turned down the fight, but this is decidedly an unpopular move with the UFC brass.
To the surprise of no one, Oliveira came into the fight prepared to hulk Brooks around.
Brooks’ timing on the entry here was good, but he shot too low underneath Oliveira’s hips. Oliveira immediately pivoted off his lead leg, pummeled, and stronk’d Brooks up against the fence with double-underhooks. At some point in the first round, Oliveira actually managed to break one of Brooks’ ribs and given how physically overwhelmed the former Bellatorian looked, it’s not hard to see why.
After getting muscled around for the better part of three rounds, Oliveira eventually took Brooks down and just smashed the compromised fighter until a stoppage materialized. Sad way to break a tremendous winning streak.
Oliveira’s entire strategy hinged on smothering Brooks along the cage and exhausting him. The weight miss and the broken rib amplified this approach, meaning that Brooks was basically pinned for long stretches of this fight with no ability to frame out. Even when Brooks managed to initiate some wrestling offense of his own, he couldn’t hold Oliveira down for any significant amount of time. If Brooks’ mainline strategy in a fight consists of giving opponents early opportunities in order to respond as a fight progresses, then the Alex Oliveira fight demonstrates some real problems with that approach. It was precisely because Brooks was too patient in tie ups that caused his rib to break, since Oliveira took every opportunity available to jut his head underneath Brooks’ chin and knee him in the stomach. Without crossfacing or grabbing bicep control, Brooks looked fairly impotent in the clinch and too patient for his own good.
I’d be lying if I said the weight cut + broken rib didn’t impact the outcome of this fight, but there was more to be concerned about from Brooks’ end than I initially assumed. During the Chandler fights, Brooks seemed to improve his own grip-fighting as the bout wore on. For example, Brooks defending a takedown from Chandler became feeding a single and defending a takedown, which became feeding a single, defending a takedown, and grip-fighting for a kimura on Chandler’s left arm to improve position. When this works, it can open up a fighter’s game entirely, but in this instance, it revealed a lack of systematic clinch defense from Brooks.
Out of Brooks’ three UFC losses, this was this most forgivable. Not only did Brooks have the added excuse of his opponent missing weight and breaking his rib, but Alex Oliveira quickly moved back up to welterweight and has more or less done fairly well up there. Most people could look at Brooks getting bullied and point to those factors as being at least somewhat explicable for the upset loss. This would’ve been fine if Brooks had managed to get his feet back under him in his next fight, but that did not prove to be the case. While there certainly exists some surrounding controversy in this fight, it did set a nasty precedent for Will Brooks that he never managed to shake.
Section 4: A Long Way Down
There isn’t too much to say about Brooks’ third UFC fight against Charles Oliveira. Against a frightening grappler who started fast, Brooks made a terrible tactical error early that got him taken down and finished.
Brooks feints a jab into a left hook to the body, which serves as an entry into the clinch. Why Brooks was so keen on clinching with Oliveira, I’ll never know, but Charles immediately grabs an underhook on the opposing side for an over-under grip before hitting an inside trip. Will Brooks and getting thrown around by guys named Oliveira with over-under bodylocks. Name a more iconic duo.
...and, as Brooks attempted to wall-walk back to his feet, Oliveira passed over Brooks’ left leg, held onto the bodylock and took an angle on Brooks’ left side before slamming him back down to the mat. Will isn’t pummeling with his right arm, so he’s doing next to nothing to impede Oliveira’s bodylock.
If there is a comparison point, it’s probably the first Chandler fight, in which Michael repeats a sequence very similar to Oliveira’s here. Both fighters sought to turn Brooks’ back to the fence, lock him up in a chest-to-chest clinch exchange, and pull him to the mat. The difference was that Brooks was safer in a closed guard against Chandler than Oliveira, and the risk of wall-walking wasn’t nearly as high. It was the same basic mistake, nonetheless, and Brooks dropped his second consecutive fight under the UFC banner.
By this point, I had largely given up hope on Will Brooks ever being anything like the guy I thought he could be in the UFC. It wasn’t just the fact that he lost two fights in a row, but that he was a sizable favorite against both opponents and he managed to get finished by both. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the end of the heartache for Brooks. There was still one more depressing showing to deliver in order to fully cement his status as possibly the biggest Bellator bust in recent memory.
Nik Lentz was clearly supposed to be a tuneup for Will Brooks. At the time of the fight, he was unranked at lightweight. Physically and athletically, Lentz was a visible step down from the Oliveiras, and he wasn’t much of a dynamic finishing threat either. Brooks was capped as a -380 favorite, so anything outside of a victory for him would’ve been a massive upset. This was the last chance for Brooks to right his course, and things couldn’t have gone much worse for him.
Just over a year removed from the Ross Pearson fight, Will looked like a far less confident striker than his old self. He always had technical issues with his striking (a lack of feints to cover entries, dropping his hands whilst evading, and switching hitting without the depth of skill to really pull it off), but this was easily the worst he’d ever looked.
Brooks’ wrestling wasn’t a safe route to victory either, since Lentz immediately threatened with the guillotine. This exchange should’ve indicated the risk in attempting to wrestle to Will Brooks, but he wound up getting choked out by the very same sequence in the next round.
Since beginning this article and revisiting all of these past performances, this was the fight in which Brooks’ decline suddenly snapped into focus for me. At his core, Will Brooks just wasn’t a good striker. Brooks never really had much of a reliable weapon outside of his jab, so against an opponent who understood how to disincentivize this limited tool, his lack of depth as a striker became evident.
In the past, Brooks was largely a ‘look-see-do’ sort of striker. Openings that he found in opponents, he would attack. The way he actually built on his own offense, however, was shallow. Like I said, Brooks didn’t have anything reliable outside of his jab, not even a left hook. He couldn’t play with rhythm, kick with consistency, or punch in combination safely. He couldn’t feint out attacks before making educated tactical inferences; everything in Brooks’ striking arsenal was surface-level aside from the jab, which wasn’t a particularly deep tool anyway.
The lesson that Lentz had learned from rounds of sparring with Brooks was simply, “Make yourself hard to jab.” If you could do that against Brooks, snuffing out the rest of his weapons would be easy, because none of them could be executed safely or systematically. Lentz wasn’t (and to this day, isn’t) any kind of striking technician, but he kicked Brooks’ lead leg diligently, pushed him backward, and jabbed with Brooks to take away the former champion’s main weapon. Yes, Brooks looked as if he’d regressed technically from the man who fought Ross Pearson and his confidence was visibly at an all-time low, but many of the same problems persisted in that performance as well.
Initially, Brooks had the right idea in this exchange. Slipping outside of Lentz’s right hand, Brooks has his lead right leg wedged toward Lentz’s centerline. Brooks was able to grab a waistlock and turn Lentz, landing a left hand in transition, but he has no way to exit the exchange other than just skipping backward out of range. Brooks gets hit on the exit, and I am reminded once again how messy his footwork was.
Knee-tapped straight into a guillotine. You get what you pay for.
After the fight ended, Brooks simply shook his head and kept repeating the phrase “I can’t believe it.” The former Bellator champion’s meteoric rise was matched with an equally categorical fall, and his last second-chance had been used up. Will Brooks was released from the UFC shortly thereafter.
Section 5: Concluding Thoughts
Assuming I’m not completely blowing smoke out of my ass, I think it’s fair to deduce that Will Brooks missed virtually every major element of the MMA metagame in his UFC career.
Building his strategy and tactics on the fly led to extremely thin margins for Brooks, particularly early.
His defense wasn’t polished enough to facilitate initiative, and his initiative could be stunted anyway, as he waited for his opponents to maneuver first.
His threats weren’t dimensional or deep, meaning they could be succinctly eliminated by smart opponents.
Brooks could adjust in the middle of a fight, but never seemed to critically reevaluate the holes in his game to make deeper, more enduring adjustments.
Brooks didn’t prioritize his own process. He just tried to hone his skills evenly.
Brooks is a great example of a fighter who demonstrated enough facets of a game to look complete without possessing the necessary depth within those facets to truly be considered complete. I’ve harped on about the breadth vs. depth conversation for a long time, but I don’t think that paradigm fully encapsulates the story of Brooks’ problems. His game was broad enough, and clearly appeared deep to ignorant observers such as myself in 2017, but it was Brooks’ ability to build over the course of a fight that had me hoodwinked about the skillset lying underneath.
The results of his fights + the knowledge that nearly every five-round contest he fought wound up entirely in his favor by the end presented the image of a fighter who knew exactly what skills to draw out of a deep reservoir for the purposes of a specific opponent. In reality, the game Brooks was playing proved to be decidedly riskier than I initially deduced.
There is a reason the enforcer tends to be the preferred role in MMA. You can be an elite responder, but it requires more depth, initiative and process than Brooks proved capable of. Leon Edwards is probably the best example of this approach in the sport right now, but he pairs keen awareness and tactical problem-solving with his own systematic approach for each individual facet of his game. There is a much clearer process behind everything he does from his proactive clinch entries to his defensive striking to his top control. For all of his obvious talent, Brooks’ moment-to-moment game wasn’t nearly as process-driven as it seemed. Against opponents who wouldn’t give him much to respond to, Brooks looked confused and quickly ran out of ideas. Against aggressive opponents capable of putting him in danger, Brooks rarely met them with the appropriate amount of resistance.
One final note regarding the physicality discussion: Whatever athletic disparity existed for Will Brooks during his transition in the UFC was merely supplemental to the larger, more damning stylistic issues present in his game. A size and physicality advantage bailed Brooks out more than a few times during his stint in Bellator, but it served as more of a crutch than a fundamental part of his approach. Bellator opposition was more susceptible to being powered through by Brooks if he felt the need, but on its own merits, Brooks didn’t build his game to be overly reliant on his athleticism anyway. It was never going to save him without the right technical backing. The way I see it, Brooks’ athletic crutch being kicked out from under him in the UFC was consequential, but not the main culprit to his lack of success. As I’ve said many times before, diminished physicality doesn’t create problems within a fighter’s game. It simply reveals them.
I can’t help but feel for Will Brooks. Rarely have I seen a fighter’s career take such a dramatic rise & fall to the befuddlement of nearly everyone. Will Brooks won his first championship just four years into his professional career. Within five years, Brooks had four championship victories under his belt with all the momentum in the world behind him. Just two years later, he had completely washed out of the UFC. That sort of lopsided career would erode anybody’s confidence, and after his third loss, neither the UFC nor Bellator wanted him back. With that, one of Bellator’s most dominant champions of all time was left wandering in the mist.
I suppose we’ll always have the Chandler fights, Willie.