UFC 304: Brief Thoughts

Will they Brexit the title scene?

UFC 304 is a surprisingly good card on paper —one of the issues for the UFC’s British hopes has been that the UK talent they want to showcase has deviated from the British talent they should be showcasing, but the Isles have been having hit after hit, and the cream has risen to the top without relying on being loud Liverpudlians. At this point, as begrudgingly as a person of Indian origin can say this, Britain is doing something very right — with a top-tier PFP talent, the best heavyweight in the world, and several of the most interesting featherweights in the rankings under their belt, and they all look like they have wrestled before as well.

On the other hand, that does make this card something of a referendum, and England has a bit of bad memory attached to those. The three very talented Brits on the card — Leon Edwards, Tom Aspinall, and Arnold Allen — are all heavily favored going into their fights, but are also facing legitimate (if not, in one case, overtly compelling) challenges. The structure of this card (several home-country heroes running back unsatisfactory first fights) evokes an event from earlier this year, the February Fight Night in the heights of Mexico City — and that event brought the immediate men's title hopes for a burgeoning UFC market crashing down. Now, we’ll see if the lower lands of Manchester bring any more luck to their chosen.

Leon Edwards vs. Belal Muhammad II

In retrospect, Leon Edwards was born and bred to be a defending champion — in some sense, the hand of God reaching down and screwing with Kamaru Usman to end the second Edwards fight was the most predictable possible outcome. After all, he’s fought his entire career with the temperament and style of a fighter who’s held the belt for a little while, and is maybe a little bored with most of his challengers — outside of broadly competitive fights with Usman and dos Anjos, the sense is that none of them have merited his full attention. Never did this get clearer than against the truly unmeritorious Colby Covington last time out, perhaps the most Edwards 5-rounder possible — shutting him down in a transitional exchange early, easily averting all his offense, winning rounds via a few kicks per frame, and getting bored in round 5 of winning. The commentary afterwards pointedly called it a “title-retaining” performance, which was very true and also just how Edwards has fought since well before the title was in play.

That fight also had the commentary contrast the cowed and somewhat emasculated challenger with what was up next for Edwards— Shavkat Rakhmonov and Belal Muhammad, the latter of whom faces Edwards in Manchester shortly. The expectation seems to be that Muhammad won’t go quietly the way Edwards prefers — he’ll push the pace, make Leon work, and figure out how to keep it dirty enough that Edwards’ scalpels don’t quite belong. Where Edwards’ base game is easy to define in broad strokes — a southpaw with a love for the bodykick, who takes away exchanges with clever footwork and the clinch — Muhammad is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades wrestleboxer. My impression of the Muhammad discourse is that everyone finds this explanation of his success somewhat unsatisfying — that he’s broadly skilled, he’s in good shape, and doesn’t have any particularly notable core competencies — so they infer the existence of less immediately visible skills like “high fight IQ” by the way that his success doesn’t have any clear throughline.

This doesn’t seem particularly convincing either — Muhammad doesn’t make ruinous choices, but in the absence of particularly specific approaches for his opponents, that seems less like a strength that brings unique success and more like the lack of a weakness that would bring avoidable failure — but the alternative is that Muhammad’s success has come from just being a normal fighter against competition that would allow that to disproportionately succeed. Considering that his run to contention has mostly been against opponents on the edge of washing out, as well as benefitting from a midfight injury of Gilbert Burns, this would seem to be more parsimonious.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem like a great sign for his title fight, with Edwards off several wins in a row over wrestly guys who want in theory to push a pace — Edwards somewhat exists to deal with this type of generalist, who relies more on doing lots of things than having having a particularly great process to close distance and force exchanges. Muhammad’s success against the likes of Luque and Burns (injury aside) came from being kinda clever moving around and surprising them as they followed him — but Edwards benefits from an opponent looking to draw him forward, as his biggest issue is his relative inefficiencies moving back himself, and can score at long range with kicks as Muhammad looks to set those traps. To make Edwards uncomfortable, Muhammad probably needs pressure — but that takes him away from the craftier tools he’s shown since their first bout, and that fight showed Edwards quite comfortable defusing the forward charges of Muhammad by breaking the line.

So the question now is, is there something that separates Muhammad from Kamaru Usman and Colby Covington going in, where they lost a decision (in fight 3 for Usman, at least) failing to consistently ground Edwards and push a pace? Surprisingly, there is, although it doesn't really help Belal — he's weirdly specifically vulnerable to the southpaw double attack, so this seems like it could be a battle of Leon trying to keep it a sparring pace but Muhammad getting hurt more often than Edwards generally sets designs for. Nevertheless, expect Edwards’ ennui to set in at some point, so Edwards by 49-46.

Tom Aspinall vs. Curtis Blaydes II

Something like the Volkov/Pavlovich fight from a few weeks ago, I'm surprisingly excited for this one. Aspinall and Blaydes are perhaps the most respectable of all the heavyweights, guys who seem to think about fighting in a normal (dare I say quite smart) way, and I thought even around their meaningless first fight that they were probably the best in the world — and now they're fighting for a belt, which really should be the belt but for Jon Jones holding up the game. I don't have a ton to say here, mostly because Aspinall’s fights have been so short — he looks like a great athlete with some consistent ideas of playing off his lead hand, as well as varied and crafty transitional tricks, but he could always just have some massive hidden flaw we haven't seen yet. That said, I think the issue I see for Blaydes here is more (to be a bit pretentious) philosophical than anything, assuming Aspinall is at least average over the distance for a heavyweight.

I think the best way I can put it is that Blaydes slightly overcommits to being the exact polar opposite of Ciryl Gane. One thing that came up in the Euro tier list from my colleague was that Gane’s progression (or lack thereof) betrays something of a disdain for improvement as an MMA fighter; Gane is a pure specialist, but whose game (unlike the cool specialists) doesn't really seem to account for the fact that he's in a sport which allows other things. His A-Game at range doesn't lead to taking over fights particularly decisively, it doesn't build in any real way because to him it doesn’t need to, and the only thing stopping more fighters from putting him in uncomfortable spots is him being a great athlete. It lacks cohesion almost intentionally — where Blaydes’ style is almost overcohesive at this point, which is a slightly more nuanced criticism that comes with far more admiration.

Blaydes doesn't seem to have a great deal of natural comfort as a striker, and his early fights had a lot of “huge explosive shots covering lots of distance to get takedowns” — but now, he’s developed a solid 1-2ing game that he can build off, even beating one of heavyweight’s better fencers in Junior dos Santos doing that (and yeah, JDS was old, but Blaydes took a path that could’ve had some resistance there). I think the issue, though, is that at this point one piece of his style doesn’t substitute for another if something goes wrong — Blaydes has grown to rely on his boxing and wrestling working in concert to become more than the sum of his parts, but if his entire game isn’t in play, the parts being a lot less than the whole ends up mattering too. The fairly tenuous Volkov win showed that his big explosive takedown game isn’t efficient enough to reliably keep up over 5 —but the Pavlovich fight showed that just his boxing isn’t really a winning proposition either, with his defense in exchanges being poor and Pavlovich just running him down off winning the jabbing battle as a result. Everyone saw that fight as Blaydes just fighting suboptimally, and in some sense he did — but my impression was that Blaydes could build off boxing success to get to his wrestling but couldn’t really build off boxing failure, so his whole style either works as a unit or simply doesn’t really work at all. It reminds me a bit of Ricky Simon — who looked competitive with several elite fighters with all the pieces of his game available as a threat, but Song Yadong making exchanges just way too dangerous left him toothless in totality.

Of course, there’s a couple things to say here. One, not having this kind of broad criticism of Aspinall is probably just a function of Aspinall not having any long fights — but two, Aspinall would seem to make it tricky for Blaydes to box into takedowns. Part of it is Aspinall being a big hitter, although without Pavlovich’s nose for blood— the other part is just Aspinall hanging out really far away, so my suspicion is that Aspinall makes his bouncy-bouncy style work where Blaydes struggles to get his distance to compete in the jabbing battle, and Aspinall is a little more mobile and comfortable in fights where they’re fencing. It’s possible that Aspinall (being British) just gets run over by Blaydes’ more poorly-set-up contingency takedowns — but a dynamic athletic heavyweight passing every test so far (in ways that aren’t just successful but thoughtful) makes me give him the benefit of the doubt with the assumpion that he can take away Blaydes’ A-game. Hope they both look good, but suspect we see Aspinall winning at long range off his jab and people being a bit confused at why Blaydes isn’t wrestling a lot — the odds are wide but Aspinall by knockout.

Arnold Allen vs. Giga Chikadze

This is a really good fight, and I suspect both guys are a little underrated by the public —much more of an Allen appreciator which I suppose spoils the pick, but my sense is that both Allen and Chikadze have a lot of upside that’s a little obscured by bad luck in matchups and even in fights. On Chikadze’s side, he walked in off a solid winstreak at -200 over Calvin Kattar (surprisingly still at his peak at the time) who put on one of the most impressive against-type performances I’ve ever seen to absolutely mulch Chikadze over 5 — and when he came back, Chikadze got a clear win over Alex Caceres, but looking a little uncomfortable early against an even longer southpaw felt more meaningful than him eventually settling in and beating Caceres up. Even this fight is somewhat bad luck for Chikadze, a tough matchup when he had to pull out due to injury against Josh Emmett (who had already been kicked to pieces prior by an opponent with far worse fundamentals than Chikadze himself). For Allen, his tremendous showing against an all-time elite talent in Max Holloway (far better than Justin Gaethje’s showing up at 155) went under the radar for whatever reason — and when he came back, it was to a very suspect decision loss against Movsar Evloev. There’s some sense in which the UFC clearly decides which fighters they care about enough to allow to get to a title shot without being put through too much pain — Allen and Chikadze, while potentially tricky matchups for featherweight’s top-5 squatter class (Yair Rodriguez, Brian Ortega, Chan Sung Jung back in the day, Josh Emmett when he was in the top 5 off probably losing a few decisions in a row), had to lose to the elite class instead.

As for the matchup itself, it seems more interesting than people give it credit for, because to me it looks like both guys have some edges. For Allen, it’s obvious — Chikadze struggled last time against a long southpaw, and unlike Caceres, Allen has an actual boxing game that isn’t just “wide arm swings and pray”. Allen does enjoy using the open-stance distance/angles to set up counters and exchange on his terms, but unlike Chikadze, he's also fairly comfortable boxing in exchanges — and as a southpaw jabber, Allen seems naturally more equipped to handle a closed-stance fight than Chikadze (whose reliance on the open side bodykick led to problems against Kattar's clever shifting). Chikadze isn't a bad boxer in terms of ideas, but he's mostly solid as a hard puncher when his opponents try to close distance too fast — the stance matchup shortens the distance, though, and Allen having the jab to keep Chikadze busy without exposing himself positionally does a lot of work there too. I don't think Allen has the ability Kattar did to just keep needling Chikadze with throwaways and march him down, but he also might not have the need to — he can just win a fencing match with the matchup killing some part of Chikadze's usual arsenal, and where Chikadze’s loose footwork and ducking/leaning defense in the pocket are janky enough that length parity (or something close) allows them to be exploited.

So that's the case for Allen, and I buy it. For Chikadze, I think there's a fight he can fight here that's tricky for Allen — 3 rounds would seem to be a benefit to him, for one. It hasn’t really been tested, but my suspicion is that a hard legkicker could be annoying for Allen if he's pushed on the backfoot — Allen’s footwork makes it tricky to close him down, but he fights out of a pretty deep wide stance, and his movement is more in wide arcs than tight movements. In space, I don't know if this is as much of an issue, as Allen can compete in the kicking himself (he's an avid low kicker and clever about connecting it to the handfight) and expect him to be more comfortable with the closed-stance distance — but it seems hairier if Chikadze can push Allen out of position, and 3 rounds might let him keep that up.

That said, expect both to fight in space the way they normally do — Chikadze doesn't pressure outside of short bursts, and in general, the fact that it probably takes a specific and fairly dangerous approach for Chikadze to consistently gain an advantage makes it unlikely. Might be controversial, but do think Allen is still a real title threat in the medium-term — and expect him to show it here. Allen via knockout, late.