The thing that separates combat sports like MMA and boxing from team sports like football, soccer and basketball is that the former truly is sudden death. If Tom Brady tosses a touchdown pass in the first quarter, the NFL refs don’t call off the rest of the game, and even if the Warriors are ahead by 20 points heading into the fourth, the NBA doesn’t declare “mercy” and end it 12 minutes early.
In mixed martial arts, however, all it takes is one errant punch, one slip-up or one out-of-nowhere headkick and the planned 15 or 25 minute war of attrition is over and done with in seconds. Conor McGregor knows this as well as anybody.
At UFC 194, all it took him was 13 seconds to knock out long-time Featherweight Champion Jose Aldo. Maybe he got a good shot in, maybe Aldo seriously underestimated his striking abilities or maybe McGregor saw a wide-open defensive gap in Jose’s game and he took full advantage of it in the blink of an eye. No matter how or why the flash knockout happened, that left a good 24 minutes and 47 seconds on the fight clock McGregor didn’t need, regardless.
Jump ahead to McGregor’s first tilt against Nate Diaz at UFC 196 – a match-up, we must remember, that was a last second bout cobbled together after Rafael dos Anjos pulled out just days before the fight.
(Oh, and if you didn’t see it live? The whole thing has been posted online on the official UFC YouTube channel … and in glorious, glorious high definition, no less.)
For the first round of that fight, McGregor absolutely throttled Diaz. By the time the second round started, Diaz was a sopping, bloody mess. But the younger Diaz wasn’t out quite yet. Indeed, he had just started to fight, using his signature “Stockton Slap” to keep the cagey McGregor at bay.
Conor was clearly gassing hard in the second round. His strikes weren’t landing and Diaz’s were. While McGregor was never in deep trouble, with three minutes to go in the round he was nonetheless in a bad situation. Pushed up against the cage, Diaz was landing pretty much anything he wanted to. Unable to get the standing fight in the center of the cage, McGregor then committed the absolute biggest mistake of his career: he tried to take Diaz down.
The rest, as they say, is history. After nearly finishing McGregor on the ground with an anaconda choke, Diaz quickly transitioned to a beautiful rear naked choke. Conor had no time to react, and Nate’s hooks were in him before he even knew what hit him. He had no choice – he had to tap.
Had that fight been contested ten times instead of just once, would Diaz have won every match? It’s debateable. There’s an off-chance one of McGregor’s first round punches would’ve staggered Diaz, and knowing Conor, he very easily could have parlayed that into a highlight reel knockout blow. Had McGregor kept a steady pace instead of trying to take Diaz’s head off in the first five minutes, there’s also a very high probability that Conor could have spread his striking out and coasted to a unanimous decision victory. Hell, had Conor not gone for that ill-timed takedown, he may have been able to goad Diaz into a wild ape fight and tagged him before the third round even began.
Alas, that’s not what happened. McGregor hit Diaz with the kitchen sink early, and nothing stuck (indeed, Conor himself summed up his unsuccessful strategy perfectly when he compared the first round of the UFC 196 main event to that episode of The Simpsons where Homer won boxing matches by simply letting his opponents hit him until they tired themselves out.) Had one or two things gone differently – had one missed punch connected to Diaz’s chin, or had one big punch hit air instead of landing on McGregor’s jaw – things could have played out much differently.
But that’s not what happened. McGregor went in the fight with an overly-aggressive offensive gameplan and Diaz went in with a deceptively-simple defensive strategy. McGregor’s blueprint was to wail on Diaz early and often and score a knockout blow as soon as possible; Diaz’s blueprint was to absorb as much of Conor’s offensive onslaught as he could, wear him out, lull him into a false sense of security, cut off the Octagon, beat the crap out of his foe in the corner and wait for the opportunity to pound him out on the ground.
That night, McGregor’s strategy failed and Diaz’s was a smashing success. In hindsight – and despite his now infamous post-fight comments – Diaz is probably as surprised as anybody that he was able to finish the fight in the second, via – of all things – a rather facile-looking rear naked choke.
Heading into UFC 202, the circumstances are much different. This isn’t a fight put together with just hours to go before the PPV broadcast. McGregor and Diaz have both had ample time to prepare and get their full camps together. They’ve spent the better part of the summer training and preparing and watching fight tape with the explicit goal of figuring one another out. And you best believe both men have rewatched their first fight hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, trying to pinpoint what went right, what went wrong, and where they could have changed the entire trajectory of the fight with one different move.
Will Diaz or McGregor have the exact same game plans in mind this Saturday as they did back in spring? Almost certainly not. But as to how those new strategies manifest themselves, it’s anybody’s guess. Will Diaz be more aggressive out the gate? Will McGregor try to make it a technical jabbing contest in the early rounds? Will Nate try to utilize his superior takedown skills by the end of the first round? Will McGregor try to mix up his attack, plotting out a five round grinder as opposed to his typical slam-bang-boom slobberknocker spectacles?
At this point, we are all in the dark. That’s the beauty of MMA, and especially the MMA rematch. Even though we have a set template for what to expect, heading into bout number two, we’re still clueless as to how the “new” fight will play out. It might play out nearly identical to the one before it (see the second and third Frankie Edgar/Gray Maynard fights) or it might have a completely opposite outcome (see Hughes/Penn 2 versus Hughes/Penn 3.)
McGregor vs. Diaz 2 represents MMA at its absolute most unpredictable. And – considering how action-packed part one was – one could definitely argue that it represents MMA at its absolute best, as well.
We can analyze and predict and guesstimate what we think is going to happen at UFC 202. But when you have two fighters as explosive as McGregor and Diaz ready to dance – even if we’ve already seen what they look like going toe-to-toe before – there’s no telling what’s going to happen when the Octagon door finally slams shut.
All we know is that, this Saturday, both Diaz and McGregor are going to have definitive game plans in their heads as to how they are going to defeat the man across the cage. But – as MMA history has shown us time and time again – as soon as that horn sounds and the fists start flying, all the strategy and planning in the world goes out the damn window.
And from there? It’s anybody’s fight.
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