After UFC 200, what does Jose Aldo's masterful defensive performance tell us about the role of fundamentals and adaptability in MMA?

Fundamentals, guessing and reading

What are fundamentals, when it comes down to it? Boiled down and reduced, combat sports fundamentals could be described as “actions where you don’t have to guess what your opponent will do.” High-percentage sounds more professional as a descriptor here, but sometimes I think it’s better to be simplistic.

“Guess” is also a word I deliberately chose, over the more positive-sounding “read”. When someone lands something like a flying knee on a ducking opponent the natural response is to nod. “Ah, he read that the opponent was going to do that.” It becomes retrospective, so that it’s reading when it works, and just throwing stuff out there when it doesn’t. A successful flying knee or wheel kick is amazing, a failed one was just being stupid.

The fact of the matter is, a lot of the time that what separates these success and failure is luck. The more fundamental and fundamentally delivered a strike is, the more likely it is to land, but still it’s comparatively rare that a fighter throws one and knows without any doubt at all that it is going to land safely. It can be very, very likely, but a lot of fighting truly is guessing to some extent.

The bucket

Minimizing the guesswork is performed via conditioning an opponent, or a knowledge of how they act, or simply reacting to any telegraphing they present. This lends to a process of building levels and structures of offense and defense, testing how they interact with the opponent and building and rebuilding accordingly.

The ability to calculate and figure out is inherently limited, however; every fighter has only so many guesses and calculation trees in them. In a high-stress situation like a fist fight, processing ability is a bit like a bucket which empties out over time. Some fighters have big buckets, and some have small ones. Some, like Johny Hendricks and Robbie Lawler, often need to take time to refill mid-fight.

Frank Edgar has an enormous, virtually bottomless bucket. He is one of the best and most tireless adapters in the sport. Gray Maynard, BJ Penn and Benson Henderson ranged from the elite, to two of the best to ever compete in the best division in the UFC. In all cases they all had drastically less success every time they fought Edgar. Penn and Maynard made it to three fights with him, and were horrifically mauled and knocked out with a phase-shifting uppercut into a flurry on the cage, respectively.

Trimming down

Jose Aldo takes a different approach. He’s a defensive wizard, one who doesn’t prioritize learning or responding to his opponent’s patterns. Instead, his focus is on not having to do any of that at all, or on avoiding it as much as he possibly can. This is enabled by his defensive fundamentals, the multiple layers of his footwork, his head movement, his hand parries.

This itself becomes the root of a different type of adaptability. Take, say, Floyd Mayweather as the case study for combat sports defense. Floyd is famous for being an adaptable fighter, but the core of it isn’t that he takes in a lot of information and computes it all.

Instead it’s that he’s able to see the enormous corpus of data that an opponent represents, and then consciously ignore the vast majority of it, or better yet, to dump it into a kind of mental box labelled “minimal processing, use if necessary.” He has an automatic, built-in response to almost everything which can be thrown at him. He slips, he hides behind his shoulder, he parries. The areas of weakness are small- the opponent risks banging body shots in past and over his elbows, or stepping in deep enough to hit past Floyd’s shoulder without getting clinched or countered.

The amount that Floyd has to consciously think about is relatively small and so, for him, adapting is relatively easy. The heavy lifting of the defense is performed almost without thought, based in tenets of distance, foot position and pure reflexes. Even those attacks from his opponents which have some success, like the aforementioned body shots, can be effectively ignored in many situations because his vital areas are covered by his elbows, unless he detects that he’s somehow behind enough that he needs to pay attention to them.

Thus it becomes almost impossible for the opponent to pattern match Floyd, whilst he can dip into the structures of his opponent’s offense almost at will, attacking in different places and at different structural weak spots, or ignoring entire lines of attack wholesale. He used to do it with the jab, but in more recent years he appeared to favour the right hand. He jealously parcels out the contents of his bucket, and never comes close to emptying it.

That’s boxing’s greatest defensive maestro. It’s something like what MMA’s greatest defensive fighter does. It’s what he did at UFC 200.

Just for you

Jose Aldo is tactically gifted, but there have sometimes been questions about his broad-brush strategic improvements. It seems almost unfair to Frank Edgar that Aldo has seemed to choose to demonstrate unveilings and major shifts solely for him.

In their first fight at UFC 156, Aldo’s famous weapon was the leg kicks which pulped Faber’s thigh. So, Edgar came out ready to counter the leg kicks; to catch them and land counter punches and takedowns. Instead, Aldo revealed what would become his next weapon- the jab. He speared Edgar’s entries, and marked him up for a relatively clean decision win.

At UFC 200, it appeared that Edgar was prepared for both options. He’d clearly trained trigger counters to the jab, getting in underneath and throwing combinations.

It didn't work. Edgar tried a lot of different attacks on Saturday and in response Aldo drew twisting, instinctive lines in space where those attacks fizzled and died. Small areas of vulnerability closed and kept closing behind him as he reacted, but almost never guessed. Backstep, pivot, parry, stiff-arm, reset.

Every now and again, Aldo would pick a point to ram something through, and this time it wasn’t the jab. It was the right. Fadeaway rights, long straights, or stopping and sitting down as Edgar closed. Jump knees to the Jersey fighter’s chest.

Edgar competed. He threw leg kicks, but Aldo maintained a distance where they were robbed of most of their force, landing with the foot, and like Mayweather does with body shots, he largely simply ignored them. His corner applied no ice to his legs between rounds. The Jersey fighter clipped Aldo a few times, but normally at full extension, or with shots that were at least partially parried. Edgar had some success with chest-to-chest exchanges, and then Aldo briefly opened up the faucet and backed him off with a brutal flurry.

Aldo’s jab started to creep back in the second round. Late in round three and in round four, he started to throw his first leg kicks of the fight. He threw a head kick early in the fifth. As he became more confident that he’d sealed Edgar’s game, his own began to slowly unfurl.

Frustration

Frank Edgar is a bad man. He started off his career taking a no-holds-barred fight, getting his orbital bone broken on his way to a win; he described how he could “feel the air between [his] skin and skull just crackling” in the bathroom afterwards and decided, yes, this was the career for him.

He’s taken horrific beatings and come back to win; lost three consecutive championship fights and returned better than ever. He’s been disappointed after fights, but in the moment his body language is always the same, with the only changes being in tempo and the quizzical tilt of the head movement, and the way he’ll occasionally tap his forehead with his glove; the image of a man forcing himself to think faster.

At around 2:20 remaining of the fifth, Aldo circled away from the cage and feinted a jab. Edgar charged forward and threw five consecutive punches. Aldo skipped backwards, hands held high and palms open to catch anything that might reach him, like he was playing pattycake. As Edgar closed, Aldo placed one hand on the Jersey fighter’s neck, and gently pushed him towards the cage.

Just after that exchange, a five-piece that ended with Edgar being guided away; an errant kid who tried to go into the room of a house where he wasn’t allowed, there was a flicker of something new in Edgar. Just for a second he raised his hands and dropped them again, the universal signal for frustration: “aw, come on.” It was just a tiny moment, but then he was back, as Frank Edgar always is.

The same wall

It’s good to see Jose Aldo return to form. There are have been few fighters who have had a more humiliating, catastrophic loss; a fight which introduced him to the masses as a bum who was scared of Conor McGregor, and then seemingly validated those assessments; a loss which left him desperately sobbing in his changing room.

It’s hard not to feel bummed out for Frankie Edgar. His run to get back to a belt was one of the best, and one that in most worlds would have resulted in a title fight against the “real” beltholder. The McGregor match is now (outside of MMA throwing out one of it’s weird variables) one that’s never going to happen.

It wasn’t ever really a fight that I personally would have favoured Edgar in… but I couldn’t help but notice how McGregor has always been very quiet about Frankie Edgar. Conor is one of those rare fighters who combines an analytical mind with being a genuine fan of the sport, so it’s interesting to see his takes, direct and indirect, on his peers.

Maybe he never went after Edgar because he’s simply a fan in his own way, and it’s hard not to be, to be fair. That said, it’s also possible to look at the champion getting marked up from bottom by Mendes (a famously fairly inert guard player) and remember how Edgar crushed Penn, Oliveira and Swanson from top and think: Hmmm. Maybe McGregor saw something there.

Regardless, unfortunately for Edgar, this result is what it is- him hitting the same wall he did last time. It wasn’t a blow-out, but it’s also difficult to see that there’d ever be much of a path through for him; easy to see that he could fight Aldo and that it would always be a reasonably competitive loss. His prodigious adaptability would always be trapped behind the shifting barriers of Aldo's fundamental defense, forcing him to ask questions and never knowing whether what returned to him would be a hard answer, or just silence as Aldo drifted away.