I see some of you guys on King Mo. Am I missing something here? Rampage is coming off a two KO wins. His last three fights before that (losses) were Texeira, Bader and Jones. King Mo did not impress me in his last fight and no need to compare the level of competition. Are you guys expecting Mo to hold him down for three rounds?
I'm on Mo & I think we're getting a gift here and I'll explain why:
Indeed, Rampage did look "good" in his last fight, and he knocked out his prior two opponents, but look who he was fighting ffs, Joey Beltran and Christian M'Pumbu. First off, M'Pumbu is just a very very low level fighter; one who has no business competing as a LHW to begin with, and had just lost back-to-back fights vs. Travis Wiuff & Attila Vegh. Additionally, Beltran had accepted the fight on extremely short notice. What's more, Beltran was putting Quinton through the paces before ultimately giving Rampage the separation he needed to let his hands go and get put to sleep.
Alternatively, King Mo looked a bit worse in his fights, but he faced Emmanuel Newton, a fighter who is far better than either of the two fighters Rampage faced. While Mo is 0-2 vs. "The Hardcore Kid", we have to put the losses in their proper perspective. Taking nothing away from Newton, Mo was was starched in their first foray by-and-large because he was overconfident and kept his hands down never anticipating the spinning technique. Then, in their ensuing matchup, Mo & Newton engaged in a back and forth affair that could have went either way; regardless, Mo fought a much better fight against quite possibly the most underrated fighter in all of MMA. When Newton is "on", he is a top 10 LHW by all standards, and at this point of his career, I think Newton would defeat Rampage cleaner than he did vs. Mo.
Now, aside from Newton, we've saw Mo run through Petruzzelli, Noe, and just over two months ago he defeated a very game Zayats 30-27 on all cards. So, while Mo hasn't looked as good in Bellator as he did in Strikeforce, and Rampage has looked better than Mo thus far in Bellator, I think we have to judge their performance based on individual merits and not in a vacuum. That is to say, we have to do more than just look at FightFinder or Wiki cap this fight. Instead, we need to plug in the variables and judge them accordingly, variables such as quality of competition and lastly how the two matchup with one another.
Styles make fights, and I think Mo's wrestling will be the difference here. Early on Beltran was having the same success that Bader had by implementing the same gameplan more or less; this consisted of making it a dirty fight and using a log of clinch work up against the gage. Let's be real, Mo is 10 x the wrestler of both men and has the requisite toolkit to follow the same blueprint to success.
However, most importantly, we have to look at the odds; this fight is not being contested at even odds, but instead we're getting Mo as a 2:1 dog. Now, based on everything we know about the two men, if Mo isn't a livedog I don't know who is.
