Fans were anything but pleased with Clay Guida's non-confrontational approach to his UFC on FX 4 bout against Gray Maynard last Friday night. Guida took home a split decision loss after moving and occasionally event sticking Maynard. Even UFC president Dana White bashed Guida's performance and was infuriated that one of the judges scored it for Guida.

Guida's coach Greg Jackson took a lot of the heat for Guida's changed ways.

He explained his perspective to Sherdog, read it after the jump...


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"I wanted Clay to, after he drew Gray out, to engage a little bit more, but I think Clay was waiting for him to open up a little bit and he was able to land some combinations when he did that. But one of the things that I think both Clay and I learned is that … we need to do a little more right after the misses, kind of jumping on him a little bit more. I chalk it up to experience and a learning process, and hopefully we won’t be in that situation again where we have such a close decision. Hopefully we’ll be able to dominate the next time."

On Guida’s past performances: "In a lot of those fun, exciting fights, he ended up on the wrong side of those. He would get dropped or he’d get choked out a lot of times. You have to be able to fight the guy that’s in front of you, and Gray is an incredible fighter. … To just run at that guy and throw caution to the wind and hope you don’t get caught with a big punch and choked out again, it is a little silly. You do want to be able to try to do something that maybe favors you a little bit.

"Now again, we should have engaged a little bit more, and that’s just the way the fight went down, but I’m never going to tell my guy, ‘Listen, this guy does everything better than you. I just want you to take all the damage you can until he gets tired of punching you in the face so that everybody’s jumping up and down and then maybe you’ll win, but maybe you’ll just get choked out.’ That doesn’t seem very smart to me at all. … I’m always going to be trying to do it smartly. It’s got to be an entertaining fight obviously, but at the same time you can’t just jump on somebody that’s stronger than you, that hits harder than you and has better wrestling than you do."

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