January the 17th is the date me and so many others has longed for. The return of the man that changed the striking game in MMA. The man that looked so dominant, improved every fight and was so well-rounded. The return of Dominick Cruz. His opponent? No less then TJ Dillashaw, the man that so brilliantly dissmantled the undeafeated for nine years and then champion Renan Barao. Twice

Cruz has since 2011 only fought once due to a train of injuries. His comeback, in april 2011, was against Takeya Mizugaki who Cruz won over in just over a minute. The performance of ”The Domin8er” was flawless.

His fights before that one was not as flawless though and especially not so short. I will mainly focus on his fight agains Demitrious Jackson and Urijah Faber (second fight) since that is, in my eyes, the best opponents he have faced. Let us begin to exploit Dominick Cruz.

First thing TJ wants to do is to kill Cruz’s rythm. This can be said for more or less every fighter, but when you are facing Cruz this is extra important. Cruz is utilizing a certain crouch, that Mohammed Ali and several other great boxers used, for both offence and defence.



I won’t go in deeper on how Cruz uses these so called ”bumps” because BJJ Scout did a wonderful work of that not long ago. Please check the bottom of this article for the link, or just search at Youtube.

If Cruz can’t get his bumps going, both his offence and defence will be greatly damaged. We saw this alot in his fight against Demitrious Johnson. DJ did an awsome job of pressureing Cruz. Moving punching combinations quickly put Cruz with his back against the cage and with no room to move in and out with bumps.

Unfortunatly DJ did not know how to use this advantage. He let himself get turned easily and one time he even did this to himself.



This really was another era though. Ring cutting had not found its way into the basic MMA game yet, nor had cage-utilization. Plus this was in the 4th round of a high output match.

In neither of Cruz’s last three fights have he fought anything backing up. Against Jorgensen did Cruz a few amazing backstep and landed some good hooks, but I have’nt much of it since. This is another reason TJ should make Cruz back up.



Be careful when you are pushing thou.

The next great thing DJ did to kill the bumps was to throw alot of high kicks. This discourage Cruz to crouch down.



Time one well and it’s game over.

The movement of Cruz is the second thing you wanna kill. Best way should be to cut the cage constanly but I would love to see TJ try and throw some lowkicks. DJ timed one beautifully when Cruz tried to circle out of range. Unfortunately only once. Combine the ring cutting with in-stepping lowkicks when Cruz circles out and you could damaged the legs pretty good.



Cruz movement is really good so even with a solid lowkicking strategy it will be hard to land them

As mentioned, Cruz have fought 1:01 minute in the octagon for almost 5 years so alot of his game will have evolved. Iam really excited to see how Cruz will deal with TJ and how he will counter if TJ does any of the above things. I’am also very excited if TJ’s coach, Duane Ludwig, have solved the Cruz-puzzle in any other way (which he probably have).

I hope you enjoyed this rather short article. I did’nt have very much time to put into it, this was more of an experiment to see if I could guess TJ Dillashaw’s gameplan right at all. Next article will be after this fight.

Jack slack’s article about Dominick Cruz.

All of Jack Slack’s articles, from newest to oldest. (He will release a 3 part series of this fight so stay tuned).

BJJ Scout’s video analys of Dominick Cruz Part 1 of 2 (look at part 2 if you want to see what the bumps is all about).