When Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier finally meet for the second time at UFC 214 on July 29, they’ll put a cap on a rivalry that has lasted for more than three years.
Jones won their first meeting handily, taking a clean but competitive decision over the former Olympic wrestler before his bevy of self-induced personal and legal troubles, ranging from an issue with cocaine to run-ins with the law to testing positive for an estrogen blocker three days before Jones-Cormier 2 was scheduled to headline UFC 200 last summer.
While Cormier was competitive in their first fight, is there any reason to expect him to do better than he did in their first meeting against perhaps the most gifted fighter in the history of MMA?
Jones has a loss on his record, but he’s rarely been challenged, and he’s never been defeated. His dominance rests on two things. First, his exceptional work at long range, a function of both his absurdly long reach (84 inches) and the skill necessary to make use of it; and second, his mauling work in the clinch, whenever he can get his hands on his opponent. This means that Jones’s opponent has to walk a tightrope while trying to stay in the Goldilocks zone, where he isn’t so far out as to eat kicks and straight punches but isn’t close enough for Jones to grab hold of him.
Because of the five-inch height disparity and 12-inch reach difference, there are huge chunks of space where Jones can hit Cormier and Cormier can’t hit him back. That was a consistent dynamic in their first fight: Cormier would press forward, only for Jones to lace him with long-range strikes like kicks and straight punches as he pressured. Here’s one example:
Cormier has stepped into range, precisely the space where he should be able to make some hay against his taller opponent. In his desire to come to grips with Jones, however, Cormier has neglected his footwork and allowed Jones to get his lead foot to the outside of Cormier’s. This creates an advantageous angle for Jones, and the second Cormier’s lead foot touches down, Jones plants a snapping straight left on his jaw.
This gives Jones space to move back to the middle of the cage, rendering moot the past moments Cormier has spent painstakingly moving forward and trying to get inside Jones’s reach. Now that Jones has reestablished the distance, Cormier has no choice but to start from scratch.
Over and over in their first fight, Jones pulled off some variation on this sequence.
Jones has a wide array of tools for imposing his preferred distance. The straight left is one of them, but more often, he throws an array of kicks in bewildering combinations. Here’s an example from his April 2016 fight against Ovince Saint Preux:
Saint Preux pressures, trying to get through Jones’s reach into a range where he can work. In response, Jones takes a small step to the right to create an angle and drives a round kick into the outside of Saint Preux’s left leg. Saint Preux resets and then steps forward again, just in time for Jones to slam another round kick into Saint Preux’s arm. Now Saint Preux is moving backward, and Jones finishes with a side kick into the meat of his right leg.
Each of these kicks comes at an increasing range, finishing with the side kick — the longest-range strike of the three — sticking Saint Preux all the way outside, much too far to land anything of his own.
Jones conditions his opponents to stay farther back than they want. He punishes them every time they try to come in, and before they realize it, they’re standing at long range, just a bit too far out to reach him.
Cormier struggled with this in their first fight. Too often, Cormier walked into Jones’s range without doing anything to disguise his entry and then stopped there. As we saw in the first .GIF above, he was too willing to back off and give Jones space even after hitting him, which meant that Cormier then had to start the process from scratch.
Since their first meeting, however, Cormier has become more comfortable sticking to his opponent, and has developed better tools for pressuring. Here’s an example from his October 2015 fight with Alexander Gustafsson:
Cormier pursues Gustafsson through the cage. As the Swede tries to escape, ducking off to an angle, Cormier lunges forward into a shifting right hand that takes him from the orthodox stance into southpaw. This allows Cormier to cover more distance than his limited height and reach would normally allow him to.
What comes after he lands the punch is equally important. Instead of allowing Gustafsson to circle freely back into the middle of the cage, Cormier immediately comes after him, keeping the pressure on.
Here’s another example, this time beginning in a tie-up:
Cormier is in the clinch with Gustafsson and is using a strong overhook to control the Swede’s right arm. With Gustafsson’s head dipped, Cormier plants a hard uppercut and then a right hook on his chin, and then fires off a left hook as Gustafsson tries to escape. Rather than backing off here, Cormier again sticks with Gustafsson and continues to pressure.
Staying on the opponent and entering the danger zone with a plan are new developments for Cormier, and they should help him against Jones.
The former Olympian has historically been a great clinch fighter, and much of his bread and butter comes with sequences of hooks and uppercuts in the tie-ups:
Cormier uses a single-collar tie to control Gustafsson’s head and pull it down into the path of a series of right uppercuts.
These kinds of dirty boxing exchanges are where Cormier does his best work. He isn’t afraid to pursue his opponent and wade into the pocket, because even if he overshoots he can grab hold and use his technique, strength and endurance to wear his opponent down with these short punches. Even leaving aside the damage from strikes like this, grappling with a wrestler like Cormier is exhausting in itself.
Against Jones, however, Cormier’s advantage in the clinch disappears. Jones is perhaps the best inside fighter in MMA.
Cormier did have success in the clinch against Jones in their first matchup, but even when he won the individual battles, he lost the war. Jones made Cormier work, and while Cormier was throwing uppercuts, Jones brutalized Cormier’s body with hard knees. In the short term, Cormier won with head shots, but in the long run, Jones’s body work and sheer pace on the inside drained Cormier’s gas tank.
This doesn’t mean that Cormier has lost the fight if he finds himself in the clinch with Jones in their rematch, but it does take away his safety blanket as he pressures.
This is the tightrope Cormier has to walk. He needs to intelligently and safely work his way through Jones’s barrage of kicks while throwing and landing at a higher rate in the pocket, but he can’t come so far in that he lets Jones grab hold of him and impose himself in the clinch. He must pressure Jones, but not so recklessly that he takes too much damage; he must get close enough to land punches, but not so close that Jones can work him over on the inside.
Can Cormier do that? With Jones coming off two long layoffs between fights, he might be rusty, and Cormier’s relentless pressure could exploit that. At the base level, though, this is an exceptionally difficult matchup for Cormier. He has to be perfect to successfully walk that tightrope. Maybe he’ll rise to the occasion. It’s certainly possible.
Against a fighter as talented and skilled as Jon Jones, there’s no margin for error.
Patrick Wyman is a mixed martial arts scout who’s earned his PhD. He hosts the Heavy Hands Podcast and contributes analysis to The Post.
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