Is there something I'm missing with Dillashaw?
--More well rounded
--More proven to beat a wider range of fighters
--Elite work ethic
--Smarter than Cody
--2" reach than Cody the T-Rex
--Not dealing with a back injury
--Didn't get drunk and wrestle with an injured back
I see why Cody is a threat. He has a big right hand and he's super quick and it's hard to escape it. And he has good wrestling so TJ prob can't give him the Lineker treatment.
But Cody is really dependent on boxing for a guy with short arms not a ton of kicking or grappling. And he's not smart and he's hanging his entire resume on his Cruz win, which was Cruz's 3rd fight in a year with plantar fascitis.
And it sounds like Dillashaw won sparring more often back at Team Alpha Male...Cody says he knocked him out once and TJ says he won around 70% of the time. I think if Cody was winning > 50% he wouldn't be bragging about one KO. And yes Cody was younger then, but TJ might be the harder worker-- he is an insane gymrat and has made huge leaps under Ludwig. And being smarter, TJ is more likely to draw a quality gameplan from that past experience together.
Sure Cody might catch him and end the fight, but I'm not certain that he is the better fighter. He has faced no quality competition outside of possibly damaged Cruz, and Dillashaw has run through Barao x2, Lineker, Soto, Assuncao...and his loss to Cruz wasn't bad by any stretch but it was his worst fight.
Factor in the back injury and I could see Cody showing up as a shell of the guy who fought against Cruz and TJ running through him. And worst case this is a close fight. I don't see Cody dominating too often.
That Huffington artice you posted was a good read, thanks for that.
I've been on Cody since this fight was announced but the dedication factor is of interest to me here....
Let me preface this blip by saying all of the following could easily mean zero, but seeing Dillashaw transform his training environment yet again (assuming thats a positive like it has been) is intriguing because while DIllashaw has been able to stay injury-free and upgrade his sparring partners, Cody has had the back injury from his youth flare up again as we all know, and he's been off getting married, announcing his wife is pregnant, and traveling quite a bit if you follow him.
TJ looks like Rocky grinding in the mountains while Cody has spent a lot of time on stuff outside of training and dealing with one of the most frustrating injuries you can have. I have a hard time believing his back is actualy 100% -- this is an injury that originally happened to him in junior high/high school and gave him enough trouble recently to pull out of 213. That isn't something that goes away in a few months because you took a month off to fly to Germany for some stem cell shit. In fact, long flights probably pissed it off even more (any fellow back injury guys out there probably know what I mean).
Lastly on the injury front, a back injury is one of those things that can feel manageable in training, but suddenly at competition intensity everything goes to shit. It's a big question mark.
Also, there's a lot of talk about how Alpha Male knows TJ best since they helped build him, but the reverse is also true: TJ knows Cody very well and his team will too via study. TJ is a master of tailoring his gameplan to his opponent and seems to get better mentally with each fight as well.
I still favor Cody a bit due to the boxing advantage and wrestling canceling each other out on paper, but TJ does grab my attention here the more I think about it. It's an exploitable line if you have a strong lean one way or another.