MMATH

I just finished watching the fights for the TUF 9 finale. I’m finding that my ability to predict fighter’s progression is becoming less useful. I was expecting Diaz to completely control his fight after watching how bad Stevenson looked in his last fight. I expected Diaz to be the fighter who has progressed due to the same training that is making his older brother remarkably better. Maybe osmosis is not a factor in MMA but it feels like Diaz is reliving Nick’s past. I could only envision the fight as Diaz controlling a round and a half  with his lanky “faggot punches” and then managing a take down or even pulling guard to get a slick sub against Stevenson. Instead, he fell back to the classic Diaz game plan of waiting for an opportunity off his back. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a dangerous, confident guy on his back but it feels like he is just giving away points to the judges while he will wait for an opportunity that is much less likely to come against quality opponents.

Guida and Sanchez was my other moment of “‘what the fuck was I thinking?” I love Guida. A lot of people are hard on the guy cause he does favor lay and pray but damnit, I find him entertaining still. Maybe it is the 80s Quiet Riot hair-do or just his non-stop energy, but I’m always rooting for the guy. I thought he had a very good chance at pulling this fight out. Sanchez has always been his weakest on his back and while he has good takedown defense, it was never bulletproof. The only issue is that Diego had the X factor tonight. I think I underestimate Diego’s drive sometimes. He’s really a bad ass when it comes down to it, he pulls some god awful nonsense from deep down all the time and manages quite scary pre-fight glove touching. I think the tendency of thought that many people are guilty of, myself included, is after watching him lose to Koscheck and then to Fitch it just felt like he wasn’t the same fighter he used to be. Something in him was noticably different and he just lacked that furiosity that he used to have. Whatever the hell that item was that fell out of his pocket – that shit is back. He blew me away with how aggressive and progressed he has become. The Stevenson fight was good evidence of that, but Stevenson seemed sluggish too so it was hard to imagine how much of that was something tangible on Diego’s part. He definitely shut me up with this fight though. However, I think that speaks a ton of the progress that Guida is making. He isn’t night and day different, but he seems to be honing to a perfection his fighting style. If he would shore up his stand-up game, I think he would be a top contendor. People worry that he would be too much like Sherk though, but I’ve got faith in the guy to not let himself become a stale decision machine. And if he doesn’t? Oh well, he still comes out to Refused and has more hair than the rest of the lightweight division combined.