There’s a lot worth reading about MMA online that isn’t necessarily news or interviews that we’d like to bring attention to, so this is going so we’re bringing you a new recurring feature. Anything that’s worth reading or watching but might not otherwise be linked in a news article will go here, with each new article featuring the best since the last on.
First off is the video at the top of this article, which coms from MMAFighting’s YouTube channel. It’s E. Casey Leydon’s “UFC 194 Rewind,” covering all sorts of clips from last week taken at media events and more.
Patrick Wyman of Bleacher Report did a technical breakdown of both of the title changes at UFC 194. His previews before each UFC card feature some of the best technical analysis around, and this postmortem is in the same boat. With Jose Aldo vs. Conor McGregor, there’s really just one exchange to unpack because the fight went 13 seconds. Still, Patrick explains it very plainly and gets across what a perfect counter McGregor hit. For Chris Weidman vs. Luke Rockhold, he gets to go into more detail about how Rockhold was a bad stylistic matchup for Weidman and shut down the former champion’s pressure-based game.
At Bloody Elbow, Mookie Alexander went back and transcribed the entirety of Edmond Tarverdyan’s corner advice to Ronda Rousey during her fight with Holly Holm a month ago. See, for pay-per-view events, UFC Fight Pass posts the UFC.tv internet PPV version, which allows you to switch camera angles and listen to corner audio. Since PPVs go up after 30 days, most people didn’t have access to this until yesterday. Tarverdyan’s coaching/cornering work has been a huge topic of conversation in the last month and Mookie paints a pretty vivid picture of just how ineffective he was.
Also at Bloody Elbow, Iain Kidd finishes off his fight week diary spent with nutritionist George Lockhart, who works with many top fighters. This includes links to the previous entries with interesting insight on topics like weight cutting and more.
Ben Fowlkes of MMA Junkie, long one of MMA’s best columnists, has his thoughts on three lessons learned during three nights of UFC cards. His stuff is always worth reading and this is no exception.
MMAJunkie has released a sample chapter from Chris Leben’s upcoming autobiography, which is out January 5th and available for pre-order now. Fairly harrowing stuff about his childhood here.
Sherdog updated their MMA fighter rankings in light of last week’s fights. While there’s been less of a demand for outside rankings since the UFC started doing their own media rankings, they’ve become more valuable again as of late. Why? Most experienced MMA writers have dropped out of the rankings for various reasons, primarily being their role in contract negotiations and the scare a where it was said they’d affect Reebok payouts. In some cases, they aren’t as different as you’d think, though.
