The Fighting Thread

[Pinky]

nah, only one of those takedowns actually stuck, and it was only at the beginning of the fifth round. that first time penn went down edgar fumbled it. fightmetric has the numbers

http://www.fightmetric.com/fights/Edgar-Penn.html

they rate it as only one successful takedown, too. i was really pissed at the scores. one of the UFC judges actually had something like 49-46 edgar? does stuffing 11 shoots and throwing edgar off a 12th really not stack up against a single successful shoot? plus edgar ate a lot of punches on the failed attempts. plus they were only on the ground for a few seconds after the one successful takedown, edgar did nothing with it. as for strikes: penn threw more, landed more. but this is the UFC where judges are notorious for bad calls. my brother bet on edgar, and even he was disappointed that frankie won with that kind of performance.

maia came in with a gameplan of not striking, and when you're fighting someone like anderson silva that's like having a gameplan of not fighting. it's boring to watch, but this is what happens when a non-striker fights a counter-striker. leites is another brazilian submission grappler which got the same results against anderson: lots of stuffed shoots, anderson dominating the stand up, and leites refusing to commit to striking. anderson gave maia a lot of really good attacks, but maia just rolled with the worst of it. counter striking hinges on the other guy stepping in for a serious attack, and both maia and leites would only got forward one or two steps at a time. the submission specialists are good at keeping their cool, because everybody else who fights anderson gets frustrated and charges forward into a KO. this is especially true for maia since he made one terrible mistake and got knocked out vs marquardt, he wasn't going to take any risks this time. blaming anderson for being in an awkward match-up is dumb.

maia didn't make a lot of mistakes. it's just that from time to time he was forced to trade strikes with anderson, and anderson was pulling out all the stops. maia looked like he was clubbed after it was over, so stop saying anderson didn't try. he was trying his best in a bad matchup at a very important venue, and wore himself out prematurely trying to make it worth the ticket price. the only shame is that maia is a former ADCC champ and he fought scared (i lost track of how often he tried scooting on his butt, as if anderson would just lay into his guard).

matt serra went to the first event in canada and took an assbeating from gsp, but at least he gave the crowd what they wanted so he's still fighting in the octagon. the silva-maia and silva-leites fights are what happens when two high level fighters can neutralize each other, and i really do think that's interesting, but notice that leites got one more fight after that performance with anderson (which he lost) and the UFC did not renew his contract. ufc112 was the first time that dana white actually got up and left before the main event was over, so i wouldn't be surprised if maia has to fight his way up from the absolute bottom to get another title shot.