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A comparison of Cruz and Dillashaw's performance.
- Thread starter rmongler
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MIght've won had he shaved his beard.
Clean shaved Cruz > Bearded Cruz
Yea you right. He clearly wasn't as aerodynamic as usual.
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By the same token Aldo also got caught v. McGregor, barely 10 seconds out at that, but tbqhwy im not so sure a rematch at this point would go his way either.
If it were any other fighter i might agree with you, but Cruz is one of the best analysts in the game, and if theres one thing he's known for besides doing the hokey pokey, its gameplanning. I simply can't see him going into a rematch with the same look as before. Unless the fighter just simply isn't good.
That perception filter is really what it comes down too; im a fan of Cruz so of course it is easy for me to see the former sentiment. I know you've downrated Cruz in the past so its easier perhaps for you to hold the latter sentiment, but imo if one has a model that starts with 'assume a champion level fighter isn't good', it's gotta be reassessed. There's more factors at work here.
It's not that there's never any excuses, its that you say there's no excuses so you'll be able to deal with the excuses.
Before his rematch with Nate after the first fight, which, too, ended in embarrassing fashion, i had said that McGregor had the tools and the smarts to build a gameplan with which to outpoint Nate and take a decision, which is exactly what happened.
I see this as basically a 'Diaz moment' for Dom, that's the 'box' im putting this script in the movie in.
Those're my biases an im stickin too em.for now
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But here's the thing, this fight didn't end in embarrassing fashion. It was embarrassing the entire time. Cruz is the king of adapting mid-fight but nothing he came up with really worked. He was beaten soundly for 25 minutes. McGregor beat Diaz pretty soundly in the first before gassing and getting caught making a couple very poor tactical decisions. It was easy to see how he could make adjustments in the rematch and win the fight. With Aldo, I wouldn't pick him either, but there were things on paper that should have been a challenge for McGregor that we never got to see, so there's still an argument that if Aldo doesn't run straight into a counter then it's a very competitive fight. By contrast, Cruz had 25 minutes to adjust, but he did worse as the fight wore on until Cody basically took the 5th off. He was beaten very thouroughly in all aspects--outstruck and outgrappled both on offense and on defense. It's not like Cruz has a few small tactical adjustments to make. He needs to completely rethink his strategy and find a way to change the entire dynamic of that fight. Off the top of my head I can't think of any fighter getting styled on for 25 minutes then winning a rematch.
Again, nobody ever said Cruz is a bad fighter. He's still the bantamweight GOAT. He's still a nightmare matchup for anyone. None of that changes the fact that he got his ass kicked by a better boxer for the simple reason that Cody is a better boxer.
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I know; that's why im saying, if it was any other fighter, id agree with you.
If you were asked to pick any guy in the UFC who could retool themselves to such an extent over the course of a year or so for a rematch, who would you pick? Me, i think If there's anyone who could do that, its dom.
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Really though when i made the thread it was kinda really more to talk about how great Dillashaw looked, using the guy who lost as a contrast. Maybe i should have put his name first and his section last instead.
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I'd pick Jones personally but Dom definitely has the mind for it.
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That's a good choice. Well, if he ever manages to step into a cage again that is.
He's certainly been picking up the whimsical wonderful world of suhmison grabling and zho-zhitsu pretty quickly.
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What makes it phenomenal? I realise that I'm likely underselling it, but it didn't seem like he put on a technical masterclass by any measure. I mean, fair enough if I'm wrong, but I don't see what made it phenomenal when compared to someone like Jose Aldo or Dillashaw for example?
The brilliance is in the subtlety. He didn't do a lot of flashy movements or big steps. He simple maintained distance and set traps. It was the most basic footwork techniques demonstrated at an incredibly high level. Cruz couldn't get in position to do anything.
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I thought that was really the key to it. Cruz is so good at potshotting and getting people to chase him, and Cody just didn't have any of it. He knew that Cruz was going to throw off some of those bumps, and when he did he was waiting to counter. Cruz isn't really that good evasively in the pocket, despite moving his head a lot in most fights his defense is about footwork to get good angles not reactive head movement (though he didn't move his head as much in this fight as he usually does). Not sure if Dom would have had more success had he thrown more kicks and generally staying out of range, it would have been a more boring fight but he wouldn't have gotten worked over in close like he did. Cody fought an amazingly mature fight in terms of not getting baited and sticking to his game plan.
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It remined me a lot of Aldo - Edgar 2. Aldo doesn't do anything flashy in that fight, but he's never out of position and he never over reacts to Edgar's movement, and as such he's set to counter whenever Frankie came in. The brilliance of it is in the discipline and ability to take really, really small angles without ever losing the ability to counter with power.
Exactly, well said. They have the kind of footwork where they do it so well, to the untrained eye it doesn't look like they're doing anything at all.
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This then becomes a question of a)what tools does Cruz need to beat Cody? and b)does he have those tools, or can he learn & apply them at a high enough level to be effective?
If we go back to Conor vs. Diaz as an example, we can say that better energy management and chopping the legs to take away some of Nate's power & movement could radically change the fight. We know that Nate's vulnerable to low kicks and that learning effective low kicks is comparatively easy, from this and other things we can say that Conor can make the needed adjustments to make the rematch very different. And he did.
Applying the thought process to Cruz & Cody gets tricky, the problem being that Cody is still a largely unknown quantity. A lot of the footwork, head movement, and overall poise which he showed against Cruz was absent in all of his earlier fights, we know what Cody can do now, we don't know if he's shown all his cards or he's still hiding some under the table. Cruz could draw up a plan to beat the Cody we know now and it might work, or it might get exploded if Cody pulls out those hidden cards. Nate is a mostly static fighter who's been the same for years, his strengths & weaknesses are well known and haven't changed. I don't think we can assume the same of Cody, he's either learning very fast or sandbagging a bit, possibly both. You run into the same problem as fighting GSP when he was king of his division, everyone planned to fight the current GSP, but their plans went out the window since GSP was always improving, evolving, and adding new tools to his game.
As for possible ways to beat Cody, I think it begins at chopping out his legs. Cody doesn't really check low kicks, he prefers to absorb them and counter with hard punches while his opponent is on one leg. Take out his legs and the footwork and power that he depends on starts going away. Also, body kicks, much easier to land than strikes to his head and it forces him to either block the kicks with his arms which prevents him from countering with punches or take the kicks on his body to land the counter and get his gas tank drained and movement slowed. Is that something Cruz can do? I'm not sure. He'd have to change his style rather drastically to deliver the hard kicks to the legs & body that are required, he'd have to throw kicks from a solid stance instead of his fluid & often off balance stances and adjust everything else in his system to account for that. He'd be a lot closer to a Muay Thai fighter like Samkor who blasts his opponents with power kicks than the Cruz we know & love.
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Pretty sure Cruz mentioned more low kicks in the post-fight press conference. But in any case, I have both faith and trepidation about Cruz being able to do better in a rematch. Faith because he's the best analyst/fighter out there, and he can make adjustments extremely effectively. Cody really had very little tape on him when you think about it...all his UFC fights finished pretty fast, and he was never presented with someone who could push him to have to show the level of skill he showed against Dom so Dom really didn't have any way to know where to put the emphasis in his prep. Now he does, I think he stands a good chance of solving that puzzle.
At the same time, Dom just looked slowed, both in his upper body movements, his hand speed, and his footwork. He's getting older, and his style really relies upon very fast direction changes and reactions that he might be losing. In some ways this might be his Anderson - Weidman in the sense that a younger challenger didn't get baited by his bullshit to press too hard, and that revealed that he had lost a step and was relying on bullshit to pull you into the kind of exchanges he needed to win. That's not a knock on Cruz, age catches up with everyone and if you can mindfuck people into playing your game to their detriment that's a hell of a skill set to have in a fight, but once it's been shown to be smoke and mirrors it's not ever going to be effective again.
I don't want to see a rematch right away. I really want to see what TJ can do with Cody first. People like to compare Dom and TJ, but to me they're doing very, very different things and I think TJ's frenetic offense and more effective kicking game would make it a really great fight.
