It's possible they agreed to put on a glorified sparring match of sorts.
Yeah it just felt like Khabib went about 70-80%. He never seemed like he was putting everything out there until the end of the fifth
Would love to hear you enlighten us with your knwoledge
Khabib's striking defense got worse in the 5th when he got a bit tired and AL did a good job pressuring Khabib and stuffing his takedowns in the middle of the ring. But what i saw was Khabib taking a top 10 LW and outclassing him once again. He does this to everybody (except for a juiced to the gills Thibau where he still didn't loose a round). Connor has cardio for 1 and a half rounds and that's when it's not grappling, if Khabib gets 1 takedown, Connor's will be exhausted and it's all over.
His win against Alvarez was definetly his most impressive one, but let's be honest, the only decent wrestler Connor fought was Mendes and the guy gave Connor tons of problems before gassing (due to short notice). And Khabib is a better and stronger wrestler than Mendes is. For Connor to have a chance against Khabib he will have to improve his wrestling and cardio and come wiwth a great gameplan.
Eddie exclusively blocks punches with his face. The man will never lose a brawl but put him up against a lengthly counter striker and his game plan crumbles.
Al has always had a vey good ground game. Certainly better than most LWs. He's shown to be much better on the ground thsn Conor.
I always take stats, like records, with a grain of salt and look at scenarios. Besides, don't those stats include GNP strikes? Kind of hard to judge that on paper. When Al was stuffing takedowns and forcing the fight on the feet later in that fight it was pretty apparent that a striker with more tools could have put Khabib in danger. Al's simple 1-2's didn't offer enough threat, although he was finding moderate success in those later rounds and to be honest I thought he took the 4th if I'm remembering correctly. If he had kicks in his arsenal and a diversified combination game Khabib would have been in trouble and it was obvious to me.
Depends really, what makes Conor's TDD successful is his ability to frame control on the feet. You could argue Al has the better TDD on paper but there's certain things Conor does well that might make him better able to defend takedowns against certain opponents. I'm no expert by any means when It comes to this realm, but I know a bit, It definitely seems like there's many angles to consider.
Again, we've seen against someone much smaller who had absolutely no training camp.
No. Conor is a legit brown belt and has trained with a Marcelo garcia black belt for the last few years. For anyone who doesn't know, Marcelo Garcia is top 1-2 greatest bjj practitioners to ever live along with Rickson. I grapple myself. His grappling is very underrated, It's just he mostly uses It defensively. Eddie bravo gave him credit after his loss to Nate as well, countless people In that realm acknowledge Conor's grappling to be very underrated. He's got jits.
He got rocked, that's why he panic shot imo. That 1-2 buzzed the fuck out of him, clean on the chin.
Conor showed similar issues with Nate as he did with Chad in terms of TDs. His kicks aren't all that fast so catching them is very possible. And the frames only worked about half the time because it relies a lot on his reflexes. If he's late on starting that frame then he'll likely get caught up in Khabib's chain.
