Strikeforce Nashville or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wrestling

Yeah, still not a Shields fan. He couldn’t avoid Hendo’s lumbering right hand even though it was clear Hendo was only headhunting like he always does. Shields got more respect from me, but I can’t wait for GSP to fight destroy him.

We’re on national television!

Knees and upkicks could be a potential game changer for sure.

This is one of those rare moments when we can watch a sport evolve like this by leaps and bounds. Sure, Hockey, Football and Baseball are all changing too, but not at the rate MMA is.

Silva – For all the talk that BJJ is his kryptonite, many have long been advocates of those who would take him down and ground him out. Many mediocre fighters with high wrestling pedigrees will probably beat him. Chael Sonnen anyone?

Machida – One of the reasons he is so damn good is that…yeah, he’s a pretty good wrestler too.

Fedor – Err…Sambo…but jury’s out I guess. He’s the ONLY guy who has overcome wrestlers (Hendo stopped wrestling against Ando) and that is because they were too busy brawling.

BJ – He’s got great wrestling/BJJ synergy. And he’s taken out some wrestlers who were, again, wanting to brawl. Though some had to via couldn’t get him down. But those who did…Matt Hughes anyone?

Basically, anyone who tries to JUST outwrestle or take their opponent down and grind him out, wins. I’ve yet to see an example of that fan unfriendly strategy working.

And as long as the greater MMA public voices their support for this ignorant favoritism by rule, the sport will suffer. I say it time and time again…are we watching a fight, or a game of twister? Twister scores points on judges’ scorecards and yet most people seem to blindly support this blatant disregard for the term “fight” as “the way it is, the way it should be.”

Jake Shields just won a 7 figure UFC contract by being an elite twister player. THis keeps up, those 7 figure contracts will dry up real fast.

Random ramblings done. There needs to be more outrage imo. I’m finding it hard to keep my "hardcore fan’ status the longer this goes on. Maybe I’m unique.

Wrestling can and does allow people to finish fights when they use it as a foundation and then build other skills on top of it. Look at Matt Hughes: during his epic run as the baddest welterweight on the planet, he went to decision only twice, vs. 4 TKOs and 4 submissions (and one loss to BJ Penn). Mark Coleman, the granddaddy of wrestling-based ground and pound, has only 4 decision wins out of 16 wins in his career, despite having only rudimentary striking and submissions, because he aggressively used striking on the ground. Hughes was a generation after Coleman and needed more diverse skills; now Hughes is the guy that people are saying has been passed by in the contemporary MMA game.

I think we’re seeing a spiral evolution of MMA. When guys like Coleman and Couture started making ground and pound a dominant MMA weapon, BJJ guys were suddenly out of their element (they weren’t used to being bullied while on their backs), and strikers often never even got a chance to strike. Then we saw the rise of fighters like Tito Ortiz, who represented an apex of that kind of fighting. Once wrestlers started to learn to strike, like Liddell, the game changed; wrestlers couldn’t just charge in, face first, against a guy who could potentially avoid the takedown AND punch them in the face. That was the advent of the dominance of the “wrestle-boxers”, guys who used wrestling to control the location of the fight, shifting between stand-up and ground and pound depending on the opponent and the type of fight. These fighters, too, finished fights quite frequently, Liddell being the poster-child. But that style of fighting was challenged significantly in recent times; to me, one of the turning points is how Machida abused Rashad Evans – who was developing a defensive-wrestling/explosive-striking style – and suddenly fighters had to consider a whole raft of other possibilities.

Now, with more money in the sport and more awareness of MMA as an option for talented collegiate wrestlers, we have a new, young generation of wrestling-based fighters coming into the game (in much larger numbers than in previous times, and with much more advanced wrestling skills since that sport has advanced, too). Many of them are using wrestling as their go-to weapon to start with, but unlike in the times of Coleman and Ortiz, most everyone’s ground skills are good enough now to avoid being just pounded out from the guard; fighters learned that during those early years. And unlike the era of Liddell’s dominance, there are strikers out there like Anderson Silva and Machida who are better strikers than the wrestle-boxers and damn hard to take down, using defensive wrestling (along with judo, sambo, and even sumo skills) like early wrestlers used defensive BJJ. So we’re on the cusp of another evolution in MMA, in that we have better athletes, better wrestlers than ever before, coming into the sport; but they’re running into better strikers, better jiu jitsu artists, and more diverse skill sets than ever before. They have shown that they can dominate SOME positional battles, but not that they always know where to go from there. What I think we’re waiting for is the next iteration of a Coleman or Ortiz; someone who figures out a way to combine that truly top-level wrestling with offensive finishing power, but in the context of the changed (and I would say advanced) world of contemporary MMA. Or maybe what we’re going to see is the sport respond faster than the wrestlers adapt.

Personally, decisions and all, I’m excited as hell to see what happens next.

One last note: Let’s also not forget that, among those three recent Strikeforce decisions: Hendo looked like he aged a decade between his last two fights, and not that long ago would have finished Shields in the first; Mousassi laid a gigantic egg, but will improve in the future; and Melendez used range and striking to keep the fight standing as much as he used his wrestling, and frankly, Aoki is dangerous enough on the ground to warrant that kind of strategy. The piss-off was that the promoter put on three (long) title fights that had a good chance of going to decision, and the one fight most likely to be finished, didn’t.

(Apologies for over generalizing and some historical inaccuracy; I’m typing this off the top of my head.)

Yeah, American wrestling isn’t the best out there, but it’s at a very high level, and currently when looking at MMA, at least in North America and Japan, you can see the difference it makes to have been trained and brought up through the American wrestling system. It just seems to dominate MMA right now, which is why I bring that up specifically. I am certain we’ll see a continued evolution. American wrestling is just the start.