Bellator’s Heavyweight Grand Prix ends with Fedor Emelianenko vs. Ryan Bader this January 26, 2019 at the The Forum in Inglewood, CA.
One sentence summary:
David: The world of TUF collides with a little bit of Red…Heat.
Phil: Darth Bader gets ready to chuck the Last Emperor down the proverbial reactor shaft
Stats:
Record: Fedor Emelianenko 38-5 | Ryan Bader 26-5
Odds: Fedor Emelianenko +245 | Ryan Bader -290
History / Introduction to Both Fighters
David: I gotta be honest. After watching Fedor struggle, and fumble around with Maldonado’s boxing — I just wasn’t interested in seeing the last emperor. Yea, he’s still fun to watch. He’s still dangerous, even. But nostalgia is costly enough as is. Why let nostalgia turn Fedor’s brain to scrambled egg? Somewhere along the way he got his groove back, faceplanted Frank Mir into the next world, and Jedi Mind Tricked Chael Sonnen into doing something foolish in bouts he was something of an underdog in. He’s officially in the finals of a tournament that was and is pretty good. Credit where credit is due.
Phil: This is probably the most heartening second-tier heavyweight resurgence since… Cro Cop? Not that Fedor is second tier, of course, but he’s someone who seemed destined to sink and keep sinking after that Maldonado fight. Instead it looks like he’s settled into the strata just below the ephemeral “UFC-level” and is thriving there. Are 2018 Frank Mir and Chael Sonnen great wins for someone with Fedor’s long and storied career? They are not. But at this moment, his legacy is secure and he’s playing with house money. An upset in this tournament, no matter how Bader brain-fart enabled, would be something special.
David: The only thing just as weird as seeing Fedor fight to moderate success in his early 40’s is getting used to the reality that good UFC fighters don’t have a home in the UFC. Bader was one of first Seriously, UFC? OG’s. He hasn’t changed much. Sculpted out of deltoids and fists, he’s the quintessential wrestle-boxer. His tools are limited, but his career has been anything but: in addition to being a UFC contender, he’s one win away from being Bellator’s heavyweight grand prix champion.
Phil: Back when people were optimistic about the future of the 205lb division, there were four prospects that they looked at: Jon Jones, Alexander Gustafsson, Phil Davis and Ryan Bader. In terms of potential, Bader was probably about… third on the list, behind Davis? So in terms of his general career success, I think “modest, reasonably impressive overachievement” about sums it up, because he’s a fairly clear #2 in my book (Gustafsson’s brave showings against Jones and Cormier not really counting as much as actual wins against high-level competition). For some he’ll always be the bricked-up dude that produced some of the greatest brainfarts in history against Rumble, Teixeira and, er, late career Tito Ortiz, but for me at least he’s plugged away at steadily erasing that perception.
What’s at stake?
David: I don’t…know? Fedor winning would be unexpected for Bellator, but doesn’t exactly represent long term stability. Bader would more likely represent long term stability. Yea, I don’t even know.
Phil: Bellator’s heavyweight division is essentially all old UFC cast-offs at this point. There’s something of the Nunes-Cyborg issue then, which is that a Bader win would leave him ruling over one bad division and one absolutely terrible one. Fedor is less likely to win, but has more appropriate fights available if he does. Bellator champion Fedor Emilianenko against the Roy Nelson / Cro Cop winner? Sure, both those options make a weird amount of sense.
Where do they want it?
David: As cliched as the old Fedor’s a Cyborg memes were, he’s making a better case for those memes in his old age — inexplicably preserving his athleticism in his 40’s — then when he was in his 20’s when he was puffing his reputation up against Pride’s version of a reject rogue’s gallery. This is the biggest difference between Fedor and most fighters: while Father Time has chipped away at his chin, Father Time has not switched off his fast-twitch muscle fibers. Fedor never had much in the way of technique. Sure, his Sambo background always made him dangerous as a submission threat, but Fedor’s success was always about the same principle as Daniel Cormier: all else is never equal at heavyweight when you have lightweight speed.
Phil: Fedor is running on instinct, experience and power at the moment. In his fight against Chael Sonnen, he showed some of that preternatural balance from his earlier career, where he’d just flick Sonnen to one side like a matador redirecting an undersized bull. An ankle pick might have turned it around for Sonnen, but he made an absolutely colossal error by rolling off Fedor’s back straight into getting pounded out. Similarly, Fedor was able to outbrawl Frank Mir. So, while neither performance was beautiful in any way, they did at least illustrate that he’s still able to sniff out openings in both the grappling and striking phases, and that he’s still offensively potent enough to take out his peers.
David: Where Fedor’s success has been built on speed, and sorcery, Bader gets by on muscles and elbow grease. Beginning as heavy-handed wrestle boxer, he’s made subtle improvements to better sequence his offense. Before he would just spam his overhand right. Now he actively sets up some of his power strikes with jabs, hooks, kicks, damage in the clinch, etc. As the variety of his offense has increased, so has its potency. His wrestling is still highly functional. Maybe that sounds condescending but it shouldn’t: a lot of wrestlers tend to get away from their wrestling. For awhile, Bader was one of those guys: a good wrestler who wanted to test out his striking like fighting’s a cooking show contested between middle schoolers. The problem with that is when you abandon important skillsets you take away from the necessary experience to apply old techniques toward new situations. A lot of fighters just learn new techniques. Bader has kind of bridged the two in recent years, which explains why his movement has improved: he’s worked hard to be wrestle and box rather than someone who wrestles when they’re not boxing, or boxing when they’re not wrestling.
Phil: Bader has, for my money, quietly become one of the best strikers in the garbage pit of the global light heavyweight division. This makes him a scary prospect when it comes to foraging among the bigger, slower, heavier garbage pit of the global heavyweight division (see deadly light heavyweight striker Cormier, D. knocking out one of the most undeniably technical heavyweight strikers in Miocic, S.). The big right hand is now backed up by an accurate jab and a booming left hook, and while he’s not defensively bulletproof, Bader has developed enough mobility that it’s less of an issue than it was in the past. The big blitzes are now cloaked behind that jab and lateral movement, and he’s developed his own defensive tools for dealing with opponents who level change on him, like the knee he used to polish off Latifi with. His double leg is still one of the best around, and he showed in his fight with Phil Davis that even if wrestling exchanges go deep that he’s comfortable going there with a grappler as adept as Davis. Despite the beach muscles he has reliable cardio, and he’s just a good, solid all-round fighter in a weight class which tends to sorely lack them.
Insight from past fights?
David: One of the styles Fedor never saw much of in his prime was the wrestle-boxer. It’s not a flattering style because it exposes Fedor’s lack of defensive grappling, and standup that was never technical so much as blistering. Bader is favored here for this reason: Fedor may be a submission threat, but he’s defensively porous when it comes to positioning, and Bader moves well in top control. He also has the power to keep Fedor from windmill slamming those ridghands of his. On the other hand Bader is often ruined by one punch. Whether it was running chin first into Machida’s left hand, getting rocked by Tito Ortiz, or what have you — Bader can be sidelined by anyone with enough precision.
Phil: +1. Even if Fedor shucked off the majority of Sonnen’s takedown attempts, I do tend to feel that his wrestling defense has always been somewhat “sambist” in nature: focused on sprint-grappling, and opportunistic submissions, and a little more lacking in the basic library of sweeps and standups which are drilled into every fighter nowadays. The fight against Bigfoot Silva was doubly shocking: not only did Fedor struggle with the bigger man’s reach, but he looked absolutely lost when put on the bottom for protracted amounts of time.
X-Factors
David: Supposedly Fedor got sick and thought about pulling out of the fight. This has enough weird stylistic, and biological factors working against it that Fedor could be an actual cyborg, and it might make no difference in Bader’s ability to smash him like Kyle Reese did.
Phil: Fedor illness and retirement talk doesn’t particularly bode well. For me the main X-factor is still Bader’s brainfarts. There’s two available hypotheticals about these: in one, he’s put that kind of nonsense behind him as he’s grown and matured. In the other, these last few years have been nothing more than success as prologue; laying the foundations for his magnum opus, and storing up mental methane for the biggest, most high-profile brainfart of his career. Getting banjo’d by late career Tito wasn’t great, but at least it wasn’t for a belt.
Prognostication
David: I gotta admit. I’m not confident with picking Bader. On paper, this reads like a slam dunk: young, strong, powerful fighter in his prime versus an aging, chin-deficient legend. It’s the stuff of movie cliches that real life loves to dispel with violence aplomb. But Fedor still hits hard, and quick enough to completely upend Bader’s consciousness. Likely? No. In fact, I’m hoping for something akin the bizarre near-double KO ala Mitrione. Ryan Bader by Arm Triangle Choke, Round 2.
Phil: This is the problem with Bader: you can never fully trust him again. You just can’t. That being said, he has almost every single on-paper advantage. If Sonnen can (eventually) put Fedor on his back, then Bader should be able to do it a lot easier, and inflict a lot more damage. Even if Bader tries to ill-advisedly bang it out with the Last Emperor, he’s still got a speed and technique advantage, and I’m not sure Fedor is even more durable than Bader is nowadays. Bader might play conservative for the first round or so, but after that it’ll be one-way traffic that becomes increasingly difficult to watch. Ryan Bader by TKO, round 2.