BTG 82 - If you ain't spying, you ain't trying

Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. Let's get to the news. The big news obviously is UFC 300 just happened uh on Saturday. A lot of hype going into the card, you know, with it being a a monumental event in the UFC history and all the big matchups. And I would say lived up to the hype, right? It was a really good event. Uh some great fights all around. I didn't watch every fight. I missed a couple because I was lifting weights at the same time, but uh I'll talk about the ones that I did see. Uh starting off the car was Davis and Figeredo and Cody Carbrandt. Uh Cody's had a rough run and unfortunately for him, this didn't go any better. Uh on the feet, he looked good. I mean, one thing that Cody had, like for me, when I think Peak Garbrand, I think of his fight with Dominic Cruz, it was just masterful. His speed, his reaction time was just topnotch. And he didn't go wild. He would knock down Dominic and then he would just let him come back up and keep beating him up on the feet. It was a really masterful performance. Uh, and he seemed to get off and get into some a bad streak because he would hurt somebody, rush up to them, and then he would get hit, knocked down, and um, some people said he got a bit chinny afterwards. I I can't say for certain, but here, he started off good on his feet. He was looking like he was getting u uh the better of the striking in my opinion. But then once they got to the ground, he got into problems. And here it just seems like a lack of skill development on the ground. Uh a few times to me it looked like he could have e not easily but he had a escape off the back because uh Figerto got on his back and it looked like he could have put his shoulders on the mat and at the very least got bottom mount or you know half guard if he was playing more skillfully but he didn't seem to do that. He got a little too comfortable with this guy riding in like a backpack and ultimately got choked. Um, it's just a bummer for him because uh he's like I said, he's had a a rough patch, but I feel like this was more tactical errors than it is, oh, he's, you know, he's getting old or whatever like that. Clearly, he's not. His speed still look great. Just uh more ground work, I would say, that he need to do particularly escaping bad positions from the back. Uh the next match, Bobby Green and Jim Miller. This one was confusing for me as well. The first round was uh pretty exciting. Both guys were going at it. Uh you could make a case for either guy winning the round, although I think Bobby probably got the better of it. But in the second round, Bobby took over and just started teeing off on Miller. And what confused me about this fight was tactics. Jim Miller is known as a a very good mixed martial artist, but he's also a black belt in jiu-jitsu and a very skilled submission guy. U Bobby is striker predominantly. He's just going to throw hands and he's, you know, very flamboyant with a hands down. Miller, I can't recall going for one takedown attempt, not once in the entire fight. I don't think they even clinched, right? It was just all out at a distance. And Bobby was just picking him apart, you know, and his face was a bloody mess at the end. So, I don't understand what the coaching advice was or what the game plan was because to me, if I'm finding a guy that's all striking, we want to try to take this guy to the ground. At the very least, attempt to take down so that you distract your opponent and he now has to lower his base a little bit because he was upright hands down the whole time, right? Which is kind of his thing, right? He he relies on his speed and reaction time to get out of the way of strikes. And being able to punch from his hips is a again a little bit trickier uh to counter from the defensive man's point of view, right? Because you're not seeing the hands coming up from here. They're kind of coming up into your field of view at the very last moment, making it harder to read. But, uh, that works well when you're the faster guy, which clearly Green was, but you have to throw him some takedowns, you know. Uh, so like I said, that was a head scratcher for me. I mean, Jim tough as nails. He was there the whole time and took a massive beating. All right. I mean, he was getting dinged up pretty bad. His eye was bleeding all over the place. And to his credit, he was a dog until the end. the very last moments, he actually rocked Bobby Green in a little exchange, but then clinched in an inopportune moment. And I feel like when you rock somebody, you either you have one of two options. You either try to capitalize and score the knockout or you try to take them down immediately to level up your advantage. Now in this case with short time probably should have just fired hands right if you had him hurt don't let him recover by clinching onto him and letting him catch his bearings. Uh if you are going to clinch you should be immediate takedown attempt. Not holding the guy not trying to rest. You need to immediately put him to the ground while he's hurt and not at his full defensive capabilities. But again, Miller just went in the middle ground, just kind of clenched um and let Bobby Green recover. So, uh even though I mean Jim Miller is awesome, he's 40 years old and he's still, you know, at the top of his game there, I feel again this is another one of just tactics. like uh he had to know going in that he was likely to be slower, significantly slower, and would need to be tactically smart to win this fight. And I felt like he didn't really show good tactics here. You know, he he tried to strike out strike a faster younger guy that has much weaker competency in the ground than he did. Um, anyhow, the next fight, Jaylen Turner, uh, Henato Carnedo. This one, uh, again, bad strategy, right? Uh, not in the whole fight, but Jaylen Turner actually, you know, was lighting him up on his feet a little bit at one point, dropped him, and then walked away like he had a walk away KO. In my opinion, this was a big mistake. Uh, Hinata was not knocked out. He got dropped and he came back up and then he proceeded to to get the finish. Uh, he got a taked down, got into the mound, got a TKO of just striking. And this is where like being a, you know, I don't know if he was trying to be a gentleman or he just didn't want to engage on the ground, but that definitely cost him in my opinion. Uh the next match up, Sadiq Ysef and Diego Lopez. Uh if you are a Yousef fan like I was, this sucked. Uh Diego Lopez is a is the real deal. He was able to score uh uppercut off an exchange that just dropped uh Yousef. He and I think if I remember correctly, he got caught in a submission attempt. He escaped, came back up to his feet. He was still Yousef was still was hurt, but he got back up from a bad spot. And then Lopez just snuck in another uppercut that sealed the deal. Like uppercuts were on point that day. You know, both uppercuts were massively damaging and he was able to score a finish. So, I mean, congrats to Lopez. That was a really uh phenomenal performance by him. We then had Holly Holm versus Kayla Harrison. And this is another one where you scratch your head as far as tactics. We know Kayla Harrison's a judicial gold medalist, incredible ground and pounder. She's her physique is just amazing. Uh looks very powerful but is a grappler. Whereas we know um that Holly Holm is standout striker. She should be on her feet striking. was puzzling was like the very first engagement was a clinch initiated by Holly and uh she got thrown but she was able to reroll land on top but then still try to engage on the ground and ultimately led to um Harrison being able to score a second takedown and secure top position and start imposing a ground and pound game. But I don't know like why are you trying to take down a judicial gold medalist? You're a striker. It's just it doesn't make sense, right? Uh yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me. You know, sometimes when you're the grappler, you want to throw in some strikes so that you can disguise your takedown through the strikes, but that doesn't work in reverse. Um, not when you're doing a clinch, maybe faking a a level change to then throw an overhand right or something like that to get your opponent out of posture. But once you're clinching up, especially with a judo specialist who love clinches, that's where they do all their work. You know, they're not wrestlers. Wrestlers can sometimes shoot from the outside. A judo guy or judo girl needs a clinch, right? Uh that's the specialty. So, it just I mean very poor tactical decisions there. and ultimately cost her the match because uh she got ground and pounded pretty viciously and she was able to make it to the second round but then got taken down again. Um and the second time she wasn't able to get out of it and got finished. Uh so very good performance by Kayla Harrison. You know she now got through her UFC debut against a former champ in dominant fashion. So it does set her up for potential matchups in the future. Uh the next match up here, Calvin Keller and Aljim Sterling. Alain Sterling moving up away class, but looking very big. And u he did a great job in this fight. Did well with his striking and once he was able to get into clinches just took over the fight entirely. And Calvin seemed like he forgot what his game was going to be because once he started getting dragged down to the ground, he lost all offensive capability. And I think they said that going into the later rounds that um Azerine Sterling had more takedowns than he than uh Calvin had significant strikes to the point that I think he scored zero strikes in the the third round. So this is when someone goes and I've talked about this before goes into survival mode, right? where instead of trying to win a fight, he's just trying to not get finished. And I think that because Aljo is known for being a great grappler and particularly a backtaker. So, I'm sure a good part of Calvin's camp was just trying to avoid that or negate that. But once he got into the ground, he seemed like he forgot that he needed to fight back. He needed to try to win this fight. He needed to get a takedown. It just seemed like he was just trying to survive the whole time. Um, on the counter side of things, Aljo didn't really do anything to try to finish this fight until the very end. Like, he had positions where he would just hold. He would get like side mount hold and he wasn't throwing elbows. He wasn't throwing any significant strikes, just holding him. So, that makes it harder as a bottom guy to try to work out of. And there are a lot of positions where he was just holding on the cage for a really long time. And uh surprisingly the refs never separated them or warned them to restart, which personally I like uh I feel like it's a fight. You know, if you can't get out of the cage, that's your problem. Don't let someone get you in a bad position if you're not able to escape it on your own. But still, for UFC standards, surprising they let that much groundwork happen and particularly some positions were were kind of stale. The third round, it looked like Al opened up a little bit. At one point, Calvin scrambled up to his feet and had like a like a bad shot entry and he was able to power bomb him, just lift him over the top, slam him. It looked like the ref was going to call it, but he landed on his shoulders, not his head. And he did get some good ground pound a little bit towards the end, but mostly just a dominant uh grappling performance by Alman Sterling who's showing that he does have the size and strength to contend with the heavier weight class. Then uh this next matchup, Jiri Pchaskuke and Alexander Rakage is again an interesting matchup. Jiri, you know, he's a wild man. He doesn't really have any guard. Much like Bobby Green, his hands are always down. Uh he also doesn't seem to care about getting hit and he's willing to exchange freely uh a blow forblow. And this one was kind of like that where Alexander was doing a great job of chopping uh Jerry's legs. And within a minute or two, Jerry's lead leg, his left calf was already chewed up to the point that he had to fight from a switch stance because he just got eaten up. And again, it's just confusing to me as far as a guy who's a striking stylist not checking kicks. Uh that's especially calf kicks, like leg kicks, you can eat a little bit more, especially if you're taking it in the front of the quad versus on the back or the side. But calf kicks, it's just a couple and it's going to ruin your day. And he ate a bunch of calf kicks for I don't know. It's because he's fighting a little bit from that karate standpoint where the stance is a bit wider which you know the weight is more distributed evenly which makes it harder to pick up your leg or that he's a little bit more in a profile so he's not able to check properly. I'm not sure. Uh but it seemed like an unnecessary amount of abuse he took, you know, and uh it definitely seemed like it could have been a winning factor for Alexander if he could have kept it up. But uh in the first round was clearly his. Second round, it's where it got a little funky and uh he engaged in some brawls with Jiri and that's the one thing you don't want to do is brawl with a brawler. And sure enough, Ju was able to land some significant punches that rocked him and he was able to follow through. And you know, Rekitch did the best he could. He survived quite a bit. I think he got dropped once or twice and kept coming up, but ultimately he got finished by TKO uh Airi, which I would hate to have as an athlete because it looks like he just fights like a wild man. There's like very little tactics involved. Uh it he requires a lot of uh chin as far as taking blows and taking punishment and just hoping to get into an exchange I think which is why he didn't do too well with uh whatchamacall again with the current champ right that's not a guy that you can exchange with. Anyhow, moving forward, uh, we had Bo Nickel, Cody Bundich. I didn't watch too much of this, just saw a tail event in it, but it's what we would have expected from the biggest underdog or the biggest favorite rather, which is just a wrestling affair. Took him down. Uh, Bundage did his best to avoid getting finished, but ultimately got caught back now. Regoke. No surprises there. Olivera versus Serukian. This was a interesting matchup with how dangerous we know Olivera is on the ground. The the game plan of Sukian which was ground and pound from top is a pretty dangerous game plan. And uh the very first takedown attempt he almost got finished. Got stuck in a really nasty guillotine. Got flipped over to the mount again. is one of those where he probably had some gills allowing him to breathe because that choke looked nasty. But he managed to escape. Uh then was stuck on bottom out for a bit some punishment, but he was able to reverse get top. And once he got on top, he started landing some punishing elbows. And that's when we saw, okay, this is when he wanted top position and just elbowing. And u as the fight progressed, it looked like the guillotine attempts became weaker. And Sarukqin's position from ground and pound from top became stronger. Started to cut him open landing a lot of elbows. Uh and showing how confident they are in the top game. You know, uh eating a nasty guillotine from a guy like that if you're able to survive it does give you a lot of confidence because your guillotines usually don't get better over time, right? like your best guillotine is probably not going to be your first one when you get all the squeeze and you're fresh and things are not that sweaty. So, uh again, a bold game plan that paid off for him. He ended up winning a split decision. I think it was, you know, he did enough to win the the fight. In my opinion, the the the submission attempts as far as scoring, I don't think have as much importance as good damage. meaning especially if they're a choke because it's one thing if I get a kimora and I blow out your shoulder and you still fight through it like we can all see that your shoulder's messed up and plus that's going to impair you for the rest of the fight but a a strong choke doesn't really have any lasting effect. You are going to be fatigued if you were close to being unconscious but after you know a couple minutes you're back to where you were before and you're fine. So, in that regard, in my opinion, strong chokes shouldn't really count too much other than for like aggression, you know, and trying to finish the fight if the fight's super close. But when you have a guy who's landing lots of elbows, uh, doing a lot of ground and pound action, I feel that definitely weighs heavily. And, uh, clearly the judges agreed on that. So, I mean, congrats to him. That's a big win. Then we had the fight of the night which was Justin Gai Max Holloway for the BMF title. Uh again a master class by Holloway. He just picked apart Justin Gai making it look uh really easy and just very impressive. He battered him pretty bad. And uh you know it's Gachi. Gachi is dangerous. You know he can he's another guy who will get into exchanges and usually can eat all the punishment and deliver knockout blows in what the real ending of this fight here which is probably going to be one of the most famous uh portions of a UFC fight in history. The last 10 seconds, it's pretty clear that Max is winning in all the scorecards. No, there's no way that Justin's gonna win this fight. And Max is the one that calls him out to the center of the cage to swing in exchange. Again, a wild proposition from a tactical standpoint. You might think like this is suicide, right? This is dangerous. Like, you're already winning. Why are you going to try to risk it? And of course, Gachi engaged, but you could tell that it was Max that had the alpha energy there. He was the guy in control of the situation because he calls him to the middle. They start swinging. They separate. He calls him to the middle again. And with one second left, floors him, knocks him unconscious where Gachi's face down out. There's no better way to score a BMF title than that in my opinion. Right. a amazing performance and I it's crazy because I think Max Holloway is old but he's not. He's 32. He's actually stepping into his prime in my opinion right now. It's just he's been fighting for so long. He's been fighting since he was 18 or 19. Um so just he's had a long career in that sense in the fight world, but he's still obviously he's got it right. uh he beat a really bad man in Justin Gachi and very dominantly and capped it off. He ended up getting a $600,000 bonus because for UFC 300, Dana White bumped up the bonus to 300k each. So he got the fight of the night and performance of the night. Just what a what a way to cap that card. I mean amazing. But um the final fight that I saw, Alex Pereira, Jamal Hill, this again another iconic finish here uh by Potan which he gets kicked his first round so pretty short affair. Uh gets kicked in the cup. The ref steps in because you could hear the cup. It was clearly a nutshot. The ref goes to step in. Poten pushes him away to prevent him from stopping the match and then throws a left hook, knocks out Jamal Hill, right? Or he got on top of TK Oda, but basically, you know, is that left hook of death and it's so bananas because it doesn't look like the craziest power shot you've ever seen. He just boom. But man, he knows to catch him on the right spot and must have just incredible power production because it it wasn't like he had to like it doesn't look like he threw his whole body into it or really sat in it. He was moving forward uh and was able to connect that left hook. But just uh that's a very amable moment because the ref tried to come in. He's like, "No, no, no, no. Don't stop it. I'm okay." and then like two seconds later lands that left hook and seals the deal. And now he wants to move up into heavyweight. So he's a he's defended both his um uh 85 lb title, 205 pound title, and now he's trying to go up um into heavyweight, which would be 265 under. And he has moved up in weight considerably. He was fighting 85. Now he's 205. And I guess they said at 205, the day of the fight, he got up to 2032 lbs. So, he's got a good amount of uh size in him. Even though he looks very lean, you know, uh I don't know how that trans that power is going to translate into heavyweight. I think it'll probably do fine because he seems to have a dim mock, you know, a death touch. But overall, uh great card, lots of good fights. I feel the earlier fights I talked about a lot of tactical errors. Um, and to me I feel like this is something that I will address like when you're preparing yourself for a fight where you know your opponent, your coach should be studying tape and breaking things down to understand where to fight the battle. If you're just showing up to a fight without any intelligence, that would be like a nation going to war without any spying. Doesn't happen, right? That would be a very silly thing to do. And I'm not sure these people are studying fights or they just think that they can do their game plan. They're being a little too arrogant. You have to fight your opponent where you hold the greatest advantage, not necessarily where you're best at. Right? I'm thinking right now Jim Miller, Bobby Green. I mean, Jim Miller is a good striker. He's knocked people out for sure, but you have to be honest with yourself, or at least your coach has to be where just like you're not going to be as fast as this guy. And if we're going to do a pure striking match, it's going to be very hard, right? you're going to have to try to pull him into situations to get an exchange and he's not really looking to exchange. He's kind of potshotting you. So, it's going to be hard, right? We have to think, okay, well, even though maybe I'm a very good striker, this guy has an edge on me. Maybe it's small, but it's enough where it's a deciding factor that statistically he's going to beat me here. So, we should be looking. I don't have the greatest advantage here in striking. Even though maybe I consider my striking the best part of my game. Maybe my grappling level is here, but his grappling level is here. Well, I hold the greatest differential in grappling. So, even though it's not my strong suit, I should be using grappling to win this fight. And in my opinion, this is definitely where I felt uh Jim Miller could have capitalized on, which is trying to incorporate more wrestling exchanges, more grappling exchanges, even if it's just to faint and get your opponent off balance or change his posture to address uh those threats. When you never threaten the takedown as a striker, you're very relaxed because you're basically in your domain the whole time. You get to fight upright. you get to use the most reach, right? When you have to worry about getting taken down, now you have to change your level a little bit lower to be able to address a takedown threat, right? Which is going to change your posture. You're not going to be able to deliver as much power with your strikes. And now, whenever you see it like a level change, you're you're already flinching because you're getting ready to sprawl or to try to dig an underhook. So, again, confusing in that part. And then the the worst one was like the Holly Holm one. Like her striking level is, you know, at the top of the game, whereas Kyla Harrison's probably somewhere down low. And then the opposite is true for the grappling, right? But for some reason, Holly was trying to grapple there. If I mean, if I was a coach, I'd be furious there. But then again, I don't know what they went into it. Maybe they thought they were going to trick her or something. I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. That one was probably the most baffling of the the decisions made there, which clearly was a huge error. Now, to be fair, I'm not sure how different that match would go. Um cuz Kayla seemed pretty unstoppable in those clinches and she was able to in the second round uh create that uh she threw I think I very much she threw a head kick and then went from the head kick to a clinch and then was able to score a double leg or a hip uh taked down there. So I'm not sure if it would have made too much of a difference. I think the disparity of the grappling was very strong, but clearly the focus wasn't where it should have been, which was creating as much distance as possible, trying to be very elusive and strike from the outside. When you're again, when you have the benefit of getting intelligence, you should use it. Now, if you're an amateur and you're just jumping into a regular naga, usually you don't have much way of knowing. Although nowadays that's not even true because people do like safe comp and the the tournaments allow you to see the brackets, you know, a couple days before. So I can look up all my potential opponents and now that we have YouTube and stuff online and flow grappling, you know, you could look up uh their previous matches and figure out stuff to be prepared for, especially as a coach doing this type of work. But when you're a UFC fighter, you obviously have lots of intelligence available to you. And if you're not utilizing this to make solid game plans, you're doing a massive disservice because in my opinion, we build skills and technique usually outside of a fight camp, right? The fight camp is about conditioning, getting you to your physical peak, and about developing strategies and tactics that we're going to use in this fight, right? Um, so if you're not using the tactics and developing strategies and game plans, I feel like half of your camp is being wasted, right? So, yeah, as a coach, it really just bothered me a lot. You can tell I'm like I feel like I I know I've gotten a lot of wins just by being tactically sound, right? I think if you're not thinking tactics, you're being lazy, right? Uh as a coach and you know, ultimately as an athlete, the responsibility to win the fight is going to lie on you. And we're supposed to use our coaches to do the heavy lifting of the tactics because obviously it takes a lot of time to study tape and go frame by frame and figure out, you know, what things to do, what things you can't do, and looking through all matchups and seeing where your opponent's struggles. Um, and also looking at your tape and figuring out where your struggles are. That's a lot of thinking work and a coach is usually in the best position to do that, right? But if you don't have that type of resource, then as an athlete, you have to do some of it yourself. So, I don't know what some of these fighters were thinking at this event. Uh, particularly in the undercard, there seemed to be a lot of tactical errors. So, I found that interesting. It's one thing when a game plan just doesn't work out, but it was, you know, a sound one, right? like Charles Olivivera thinking that he could outgrapple Serukian is not that far-fetched right um you know he is a submission master very good in the ground but it just didn't work out for him this time you know this is something now that you have to learn from most people don't try to engage with him on the ground you know u but the Holly home one yeah that's probably one of the worst executions of a game plan I've ever seen No offense, right? She's a she's an amazing athlete. I just feel they went into the the wrong game plan entirely. The worst game plan possible. Anyhow, um that's enough of UFC 300. And again, for me, uh the point here, you if you have information of of an opponent, you have to use it. It would be silly not to you. It doesn't mean that you won't win if you don't do it, but you're making it harder, right? It's a reason why every nation spies, right? And why it's such a important part of battle. Knowing the battlefield, knowing the the opponent's weapons and tools and all the different resources they have, it allows you to make better decisions when you just have to wing it. Again, it's possible. You usually have to be a lot quicker on your feet and be able to process fast in order to make good moves in the battlefield, but it's a lot trickier. It's much better just to do the planning beforehand when you have time on your side so you can think through things and be able to execute there. This doesn't mean that you should have no ability to adapt. You have to be able to adapt because people can trick you. You go watch tape of somebody and they fight in one particular strategy and then when they show up to the cage now they fight completely different right uh I've done that to people have done that to me uh so it does happen but to act like it's not important to study any tape is also foolish right that's my take on it anyways hope you guys enjoyed that I'll see you all next