Will Frank Mir be strong enough to get Junior dos Santos to the ground when they battle for the UFC Heavyweight Championship on Saturday night?"

There isn't much of a playbook on how to beat Junior dos Santos, but what's in there is a language that Frank Mir certainly understands.

The UFC Heavyweight Champion has tasted defeat just once in his mixed martial arts career, and that was nearly five years ago against Joaquim Ferreira. Ferreira has never advanced to an elite level in his MMA career - he's 12-7 and has never fought in any major promotion in the U.S. or Japan, but on that fateful night in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Ferreira was able to catch dos Santos in an armbar and force him to submit.

It would follow, then, that the best road to victory against dos Santos is via submission, and there is some sense to the theory. After all, dos Santos has never really been tested on the mat in his UFC career, as five of his eight UFC victories have come via first-round knockout or TKO, and the other three were against Mirko Cro Cop and Shane Carwin - neither of whom has world-class jiu-jitsu - and Roy Nelson, who was simply unable to get dos Santos to the mat. Dos Santos does hold a brown belt in jiu-jitsu under the Nogueira brothers, but we've never really seen a practical application of those skills in the Octagon, so it's tough to know what he is.


Mir is likely to be determined to find out. The former UFC Heavyweight Champion is an unquestionably accomplished grappler, with eight of his 14 UFC wins by way of submission. Most recent among those was a kimura on dos Santos' mentor, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, at UFC 140, when Mir broke the PRIDE legend's arm.

The question, however, will be whether Mir can get dos Santos to the ground. While Mir was a high school state wrestling champion in Nevada, and has a 50 percent success rate on his takedowns, dos Santos has successfully defended 85 percent of opponents' takedowns in the UFC, and will not go to the ground easily. Moreover, "Cigano" has well-documented knockout power - witness those five first-round knockouts in the UFC - and Mir has a history of knockout and TKO losses that includes defeats at the hands of Shane Carwin, Brandon Vera and Ian Freeman.

There's little question that Mir will pose serious challenges to dos Santos on the ground. The question heading into Saturday night's fight is whether he can get him there.