Lesnar out, more Shogun/Machida talk

Date October 27, 2009

First off, bad news about Brock Lesnar pulling out of his Nov. 21 heavyweight title fight against Shane Carwin because of an illness. That happens to be the only Saturday between November 7 and December 5 that the UH football team doesn’t play a home game, so I was pumped to get to see the whole card. Tito Ortiz and Forrest Griffin will now be the headline fight.

As for the Shogun/Machida fight, a couple of things I’d like to point out.

I give credit to the argument that “robbed” might be too strong of a word. Granted, Shogun didn’t decisively go out there and knock out Machida and win the title, and in fact, it was a close fight. I’ll give you guys in the comments section that.

However, I saw the fight with no audio and I clearly had Shogun dominating the fight. You know, when Dana White and a lot of people say Shogun should have went out there and gone crazy in Round 5 and made a statement, I think that’s crazy talk. If you’re Shogun, and like me, thought you were way ahead in the fight, why would you go out there, change what you’ve been doing that’s worked the entire fight, and risk getting countered and knocked out by a guy known for that ability when you’re ahead? Imagine if he did that and got knocked out. EVERYONE would be all over him for going away from his game plan after winning most of the exchanges for the first four rounds.

People have different things they look for in a fight, but to me, I will ALWAYS, ALWAYS give the guy who is coming forward and standing in the middle of the ring doing most of the attacking the benefit of the doubt. I agree that you should have to beat the champion to be a champion, but that argument gets thrown out of the equation when the champ is running around afraid to engage and doing nothing but waiting to counter.

Also, Shogun has been medically suspended for 60 days for an upper lip laceration. Shogun? Nothing.

And if you care to look at stats, the Web site fightmetric.com always puts up stats for fights and here’s what it came up with for this one.

Machida
power shots to head: 8 of 49
jabs to head: 6 of 16
power shots to body: 23 of 35
jabs to body: 1 of 1
power shots to leg: 2 of 6
jabs to leg: 2 of 9

Shogun
power shots to head: 12 of 31
jabs to head: 5 of 17
power shots to body: 16 of 29
jabs to body: 0 of 1
power shots to leg: 48 of 68
jabs to leg: 1 of 3
Without putting too much stock into this, the only two real differences in this is Shogun was a lot more efficient striking to the head and absolutely destroyed Machida with leg kicks.

Robbed? OK, maybe too strong. But Mauricio “Shogun” Rua should be UFC light heavyweight champion heading into a rematch.

Category Posted in Fights