Stipe Miocic vs. Francis Ngannou headlines UFC 220 this January 20, 2018 at the TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts.
One sentence summary:
David: Miocic must go Super Saiyan to defeat the UFC’s Worldbreaker Hulk.
Phil: The firefighter in the heat of the Predator’s plasma caster.
Stats:
Record: Stipe Miocic 17-2 | Francis Ngannou 11-1
Odds: Stipe Miocic +165 | Francis Ngannou -175
History / Introduction to Both Fighters
Phil: Stipe Miocic still feels oddly underappreciated. The man is currently riding a five fight win streak of KOs over some of the best-known heavyweights on the planet, and people still just talk about what a regular joe he is. Yet I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t feel the inexorable pull as well. Sure, you can talk about how he slaughtered JDS, or the horrific beating he put on Mark Hunt, but then suddenly you find words like “blue collar” and “just a regular guy” creeping into what you’re writing. We’ve said it before, but there are both advantages and disadvantages to being The Regular Guy in the freak division.
David: Miocic reminds me of a striking version of Frankie Edgar or Randy Couture – there’s that bring-your-lunch-to-work ethic embedded in their DNA. It doesn’t draw attention to itself, so fans are left to fill in the gaps with their assumptions of what makes Miocic so awesome. Thankfully for us, that flash is not as opaque as it used to be. All of his wins since his loss to JDS have been by synaptic destruction. Basically, he’s done everything Ngannou has done but with a lot less hyperbole.
Phil: Francis Ngannou is one of the few fighters in recent memory who has organically generated some honest-to-goodness hype. Not since the days of Brock have we really seen people with this level of horrified fascination for a heavyweight, and it is well warranted. The man is a truly impressive physical talent, as well as a thoughtful, adaptable fighter who brims with confidence. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a monstrously powerful behemoth that sends people to the shadow realm when he hits them, either.
David: It’s not everyday that a fighter inspires hyperbole that feels like it’s not even reaching far enough. His career has been relatively brief, all things considered, so there’s always the worry that – like so many heavyweights before him – that he’s a paper tiger, but a) paper tigers don’t usually get this big and b) Ngannou’s imposing presence left a stamp on Alistair Overeem, trapping the big Dutchman in fist-forged amber. So he’s riding the wave of violent momentum right now.
What’s at stake?
Phil: Stipe gets his chance to set the UFC’s title defense record at three(!). Ngannou gets the chance to usher in a new era at heavyweight. The UFC has to be praying that Stipe loses this one. Apart from the promotional disparity between the two (one of the few times when the UFC would probably rather a black foreigner won than a hometown hero), there’s just the fact that Stipe has pretty much cleaned out the division already. Who’s left for him? Tybura? The reanimated corpse of Cain Velasquez?
David: Phil with some piping hot social commentary takes? I agree though. It pays to have personality and while Miocic isn’t a personality void, Ngannou just has all the traits worth rooting for: incredibly violent, great story, socially aware, and someone not defined by any lazy stereotypes. I’m not saying I’m rooting against Miocic here, but I do know which outcome would make the heavyweight division more interesting (not that a Miocic KO doesn’t earn him some Ngannou brutality residue).
Where do they want it?
Phil: Stipe is a fairly protean fighter. He can work off a probing jab and single leg chains, he can counter moving backwards, or he can pressure, marching in behind the aforementioned jab to land his cross. In his championship fights, he has also increasingly been showing a dangerous leg kick. This kind of basic, fundamental approach has combined with his relatively underwhelming physical appearance to lull opponents and pundits into a false sense of security. In part it’s not simply that he is able to win in with basics, it’s that he’s able to win with basics in multiple ways. He pressured with takedowns against Hunt, opened up on the ever-vulnerable JDS near the cage, and knocked out Werdum moving backwards. Unlike many in the division, there isn’t really a “how” or a phase where people want to fight Miocic. They simply have to be better than him.
David: Miocic takes the rare left—sequencing offense on a curve of efficiency from the beginning—right—preserving that sequencing with steady output until the end—approach to fight philosophy. Where most fighters try to exploit their best talents, Miocic exploits the best sequences of attack. We always talk about “economy”, which sounds nebulous, but this is really what it comes down to. The other thing worth mentioning is that for all the bootstrapping blue collar ethos pinned on Miocic, his power is pretty damn ridiculous. While the fights themselves aren’t perfect reflections of “wow, what a power striker” (Werdum more or less offered Miocic his own heart on a platter, and JDS is just a shot-not-shot-might-be-shot fighter at this point), they nonetheless reflect opportunistic power that will dead any man who isn’t careful, or who just sees him as Worky McWorkshard.
Phil: Is it weird to say that Ngannou reminds me a little of Naseem Hamed? Despite the fact that Ngannou is massively bigger (OK, perhaps just a little bit bigger than Hamed nowadays) it always makes me thing of Hamed to see the Cameroonian sway into odd positions and come back with massive, accurate punches. While his size, power and inexperience would all tend to push towards Ngannou being an aggressive fighter, but he’s instead largely a counter striker. He likes to open people up with a non-commital jab, then step back and deck them with those strange shovel hook punches. He’s incredibly calm in there (witness his knockout of Overeem), and his ability to pick up new skills is nothing short of preternatural. However, it’s worth remembering that even the most talented fighters have linear skill progressions. He might be picking up kimuras backstage, but at some point he will become defined by who he is and what he wants to do; the things which he can improve at will start to level off. At the moment he’s ticked every box, but there are a fair few of them which haven’t even been opened yet.
If there’s one thing that sticks with me as a cautionary point, it’s how much people tend to overvalue power at heavyweight. This was true of Derrick Lewis when he joined the UFC- fresh off gruesome knockouts on the regionals, he then went on to get finished by Shawn Jordan and Matt Mitrione. I guess what I’m saying is that Ngannou can totally flatline people, but from a competitive standpoint that’s no more valuable than a scrappy TKO… and almost anyone in this division can do that.
David: All great points. Ngannou isn’t going in there to rush the knockout. He simply knows it’ll happen as long as he’s patient, and assertive. But I think you understate Ngannou’s power (and no I don’t think this is an easy fight at all). Have you been hitting so much of that Hannah Arendt power sauce that you’re making an argument for “the banality of power”? That’s some next level analysis (I think), but it’s wrong IMO. True, maybe the fact that ridiculous power is still a satellite on the outskirts of the tempo and pace that truly determine outcomes in MMA make Ngannou’s fist napalm “banal” in some way. But I think we can draw from history on the contrary: Anthony Johnson’s power is the asset that kept fighters from clipping his wings at his absolute best (I still imagine a universe where Johnson fought Jones, and fortunes had the potential to change given the stylistic matchup), Conor McGregor, Cris Cyborg, Fedor (so much of his success came from the raw force he drew from those ridgehands), Anderson Silva, etc.
As in, I think you’re being a tad reductionist (though you make a great points that’s still valid on its own). Lewis, for example, never really had anything else in his game that connected his power to a network of options that could filter that power. Ngannou is impenetrable in the clinch, and he sweeps his attack from multiple release points. True, Ngannou won’t rely only on power in every fight, but I don’t know if Miocic has it in him to rebound from being hurt. If that happens, and Ngannous is champ, that changes the perception of “sustainable” power.
Insight from past fights?
David: You mentioned Hamed, so let’s talk Naseem Hamed vs. Marco Antonio Barrera. If you listen to the biased commentary, you would think it was a boxing lesson delivered by Barrera: “the experience of Barrera dominated the talent of Hamed!” Which was always a bunch of BS. I’m not making the case that Hamed won, but the fight was legitimately competitive. It seemed like the outside stuff colored the memory of this fight more than the memory itself: “Hamed stopped boxing, put on weight, Barrera took his soul when he shoved him into the corner, etc.”
But Barrera had to catch hellfire to execute a brilliant gameplan. It’s often lobbed into the category of “great technique beats great talent” displays, but Hamed could have just as easily adjusted for a potentially closer outcome. Why the breakdown of an old boxing match between two fighters our readers probably don’t care about?
In boxing, these patterns only survive because of length. Barrera could shoot and miss more than once. In MMA, where the margin for error is greater, Miocic can’t afford to miss once.
Phil: Ngannou can punch from either stance, so it’s a little concerning for Stipe that he was hurt so badly by Overeem with that big left hand. However, as said before, the most telling thing about Ngannou’s career is how little he’s been tested. Either this speaks to him as perhaps the greatest heavyweight talent we’ve seen in the UFC cage, or it indicates that the division is just that shallow. I suspect the truth is somewhere between the two.
X-Factors
David: Ngannou’s chin. Miocic is not a traditional power puncher, but if you get caught, and he goes after you. you’re going to sleep.
Phil: Ngannou’s progression curve is the big one.
Prognostication
Phil: Ngannou is a giant unknown. He may be concealing a major lack of depth in some areas, or he may simply be a savant. I’m generally a “prove it” type of guy, though. In particular, I need to be convinced that Ngannou can lead. He landed a weird counterpunch on Arlovski, then did the same to Overeem. Maybe that skillset is simply so refined that he doesn’t need anything else… but I need to see him do other things before I can pick him against Miocic, a man who can fight backwards and forwards, and wrestle and kick, who can jab and who can bang. Maybe destiny arrives tomorrow, but Stipe Miocic by TKO, round 4.
David: I tend to be somewhat cynical; you can’t outrun a bad loss forever, and this is doubly true when it happens in the middle of your career. The loss to Struve was pretty thorough. While Miocic had plenty of moments, he also got hit a lot before getting uppercutted off the planet. Again, it’s not a matter of Miocic’s improvement – but how far his improvement has separated him from his history. Struve didn’t just catch him down the middle either. He caught him with kicks, and on the outside, where Ngannou quietly (but violently) excels. Miocic was so many weapons in this fight and I’d admit that he even has the most important weapons (attack sequencing). But it’s hard to sequence in a field of artillery, and that’s exactly what Miocic needs to do. Francis Ngannou by TKO, round 3.