Georges St. Pierre‘s thrashing of B.J. Penn impressed the hell out of me. St. Pierre, after a slow paced first round, dominated rounds two through four causing the doctor and Penn’s corner to stop the fight before the fifth round.
St. Pierre’s performance spoke for itself. I found the real genius when I heard him talk about his gameplan with MMA Live following the fight. St. Pierre on the basic gameplan:
Well, B.J. Penn is a very fast starter and he has very fast hands. He’s got small shoulders if you look at him, like boxing shoulders. So, I wanted to make the first couple rounds a wrestling match. A lot of clinching. A lot of moving around for him to carry my weight so the blood goes to his shoulders. His shoulders would have been heavy. His hands would not come out as fast as usual. Then, after that, pick him apart standing later in the fight.
That shouldn’t surprise many people. In fact, it’s exactly what I thought he needed to do to win the fight. St. Pierre revealed the brilliant aspect of his gameplan following a question from Frank Mir regarding his lack of kicks:
Actually, the thing with B.J. Penn is that I know he’s seen a lot of my fights. When you go into war, you don’t want to show all of your weapons. [After] all the talking, I wanted to show some different weapons. That’s why I didn’t really shoot from far [away] because I was expecting him to try knees to my head. I was faking a lot, if you saw, because he has very fast reaction time, but a slow reset time. All that, I’ve been studying. When I do something, he reacts very fast. Faster than I, faster than most fighters in the UFC. But if I fake something, and he reacts – and the brain is just a muscle – he takes a lot of time to reset and to be able to react as fast for the first shot. He had a very slow reset time, so my strategy was to fake him, make him react, and then attack him.
You still hear plenty of fighters who enter a fight without studying tape of their opponent. They reason that the dynamics of a fight changes too quickly to allow for it or their opponents will surely have improved the mistakes and tendencies from previous fights. Falling in love, they say, with a gameplan could prove disastrous if you don’t get what you expect from your opponent.
St. Pierre’s implementation of his camp’s gameplan blows that idea out of the water. It’s still important to be able to change tactics on the fly (and St. Pierre trainer Greg Jackson has said he likes to have a plan B and C ready at all times), but the benefits of knowing the idiosyncrasies of an adversary provide such an edge in the Octagon.
Following the fight, I felt let down by Penn. It looked like all the critics of his conditioning had been proven right again. After listening to St. Pierre articulate the blueprint designed for him, it became very apparent that GSP’s team had created a picture perfect approach to the fight. B.J. simply didn’t have a chance.