Yep, fig is a beast but his hands low style is dangerous
He has very good head movement.
... but
He really isn’t that fast. Especially for
A) Flyweight
B) Hands down
and one of the big reason some MMA fighters, usually high level strikers, use hands down style, is because it allows for underhooks to stuff TDs, but Fig still got taken down repeatedly by Moreno.
Fig is a great fighter, but definitely not unbeatable and I think that 5 rounder exposed a few tendencies that a good coach/team could use to prepare a game plan.
For example, Fig was leaning back to evade strikes. This is generally considered a bad idea, particularly if you do it often, which fig does. The issue is that while you can lean back to evade 1 or 2 punches, if the opponent throws a combo and you are already leaning back, you can’t lean further back, so you run out of room and get caught, also it is difficult to move laterally or slip once leaning back.
A perfect example is Anderson Silva vs Chris Weidman. Silva had his hands down, Weidman threw a jab, Silva leaned back to avoid. Using slick side to side head movement Anderson evaded a few more but eventually ran out of space and Chris broke from a right left right left pattern and Silva having already committed to leaning back, had nowhere to go and got KTFO... badly.
If I were Moreno’s coach I would drill the shit out of a boxing technique called “shifting” which involves temporarily shifting into a southpaw stance to continue a combo while stepping forward against an opponent who is moving back.
Buster Douglas did this when he KOed Mike Tyson, he dazed Mike with an uppercut, followed with left hook, right cross, then as Mike stepped back, Buster stepped forward and hit Mike with a left cross from southpaw stance (because Buster stepped into southpaw)
TJ Dillashaw does this very well.
Cub Swanson also uses this idea.
Moreno could pull it off. It will also open up the shot to a single leg TD. And Figgy doesn’t seem to strike that well while moving backwards so it seems to me to be a relatively safe strategy and puts Fig on his back foot where he doesn’t want to be.
