Maia catches a kick against Usman and immediately transitions into a shot. He gets a good bite on Kamaru’s hips, but Usman is able to use a combination of a chest lock and sprawl to scramble out of Maia’s finishing attempts.

So what does this tell us about how his fight with Askren is likely to go? To answer that question we need to look at one of the outliers of his fights against good wrestlers, his 2013 split decision loss to Jake Shields.

The Mirror Matches

Jake Shields has an argument for being placed alongside Demian Maia on the short list of guys who have found a way to combine wrestling and BJJ to maximal effectiveness in MMA, despite not being blessed with overwhelming physical gifts.

Like Maia, Shields is slow of hand and foot but has managed to cobble together a functional striking game to complement his strong wrestling and grappling. Against Maia the question was always going to be who could get the takedown and get on top. As it turned out, the answer was ‘both of them’, which made for a very competitive fight. Credit goes to Luke Thomas of Showtime and Sirius XM for pointing out that this fight was the one to examine closely for insight into how the Askren matchup might play out.

In the first round, Maia was able to get the TD pretty easily. At one point Demian made it to Jake’s back, but wasn’t able to finish and ended the round on bottom after getting shucked off. Shields controlled rounds 2 and 3, Maia regained the momentum in R4, and R5 was a tossup.

The split decision went to Shields, and while Maia arguably had the case for winning based on the better grappling in 3 of 5 rounds in a fight that mostly took place on the mat, Shields did outland him on the feet 35 to 24 (though many of those were throwaway leg kicks). While it’s interesting to observe how closely the fight was contested, the two big takeaways are:

Maia does not ever try to avoid grappling exchanges. He always tried to turn them to his advantage. Maia does not approach grappling exchanges as a BJJ guy first, he approaches them as a wrestler.

What are the implications of those two observations? The first is that predictions of Maia lighting Ben Askren up on the feet are highly overblown. That Maia would do so was this writer’s initial take on the fight, but while it’s true that Maia is a better striker than Askren and would probably win a match on the feet ten times out of ten, there’s nothing in Maia’s fight history that suggests he has the sort of striking that lends itself to shutting down wrestlers. He doesn’t take a lot of angles, he doesn’t frame guys off to defend the shot or clinch, and he doesn’t fight off the back foot. His striking is designed to bring him forward and set up his takedowns as you’d expect from a grappling first fighter.

In this matchup look for him to come forward and readily engage with Askren in a wrestling contest. He might hit Funky on the way in, but ultimately this fight will be contested in the wrestling and grappling, not the striking.

The second observation, that Maia wrestles first and grapples second, is really key when determining what the dynamic of the fight is going to look like. Normally when we think of a wrestler fighting a BJJ ace we think of the wrestler shooting in and having to avoid guillotines, kimuras, and all the other threats a submission specialist normally presents. But if the wrestler manages to avoid those submissions, he gets to be on top of an opponent who has willingly gone to his back in pursuit of the finish.

Maia doesn’t fight like that.

His reaction to the level change is to sprawl and play the front headlock like a wrestler would, digging for underhooks, framing, and looking to go behind or reshoot.