Demian Maia Is Not Thales Leites

Dave Meltzer explains Maia's unfortunate predicament:

More than anyone else, Maia ended up the victim of the fallout of the Silva-Leites five-round decision. The dull fight saw the crowd turn to obscenity-based chants, as the challenger gave up trying to win, and the champion was content to take the decision.

Given that Maia, like Leitis, is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu expert, not known for his stand-up, there became two question. First, could UFC sell such a fight to the public after the Leities fight? People could think twice about plucking down $44.95 if they thought they may get a repeat of the last title fight.

The second was, what if it was a similar fight?

"It doesn’t matter what country you are from or your style, everyone is different," said Maia, 31, who felt Leitis lost his confidence during the fight which caused it to turn out as it did. "My style is totally different than his. If I fight Anderson, it won’t be the same fight." "His (Silva) fight with Patrick Cote wasn’t exciting at all," noted Maia. "And that’s with a Canadian striker. It doesn’t matter your style or your country when it comes to having an exciting fight. My personality is to be more aggressive than those two."

The biggest fallacy floating around now is that jiu-jitsu at the elite level generally operates the same across practitioners, so therefore by Anderson Silva shutting down Thales Leites (and other talented grapplers), we can expect more of the same should Silva lock horns with Demian Maia. But this is nothing short of absurd. It'd be foolish to keep promoting the meme that all you need is a talented grappler to take Silva to the floor and make things academic from there, but it also worth noting that particularly at the elite level jiu-jitsu players have their own styles and strengths. It's also worth noting that Demian Maia is the best pure grappler in the UFC.

Unlike Leites, who relies on basic freestyle wrestling techniques (with some limited Judo), Maia is able to bring his sport BJJ game of sophisticated guard pulling and non-linear submissions attempts to MMA. The key in battling Silva for any grappler will be not just off balancing Silva with threats of the takedown, but actually executing the takedown many times. Silva's defensive guard in MMA is underrated and even experienced grapplers will likely need several attempts to make headway. Maia brings a game from sport BJJ where rather than dramatically flopping to guard, Maia uses a sophisticated lever system where the combinations of whizzers, half guard sits and sweeps forces a sport BJJ match in a MMA fight. Rather than trying to master double leg takedowns, Maia prefers to use guard sitting with the immediate threat of sweeps to force opponents into defensive positions in order for Maia to eventually establish a single firm position of control.

Maia further adapts his game by more regularly incorporating classic traps and misdirection in MMA. People seem to think the way to Silva's belt is to pass guard, mount and hit the armbar. But that is telegraphing submissions in the worst way. Maia, instead, uses a lot of sport BJJ fakes to get an unsuspecting opponent to commit to a position or weight balance or attack to then land a submission, sweep or guard pass they never saw coming. His triangle over Ed Herman is a classic example of pretending to give up the pass in order to hit the submission. It's not as if Leites or other practitioners can't do this, but the ease and regularity with which Maia can is noteworthy.

None of this is to say Maia is the perfect opponent for Silva or that Silva won't just blow out Maia in the first round. But it is worth observing that just because two fighters have distinguished backgrounds in jiu-jitsu does not mean that their skill sets and fighting characteristics are identical or that a Maia fight with Silva would be redundant nonsense. I, for one, would be very interested to see what Maia can do against Marquardt and perhaps Silva and I don't expect a replay of the Leites fight. Neither should you.