In going back and watching the way Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos have manhandled their recent opponents I was struck by how similar, stylistically, these two appeared. Not necessarily that similar at all the two men who will meet for the UFC heavyweight championship on the inaugural UFC on Fox broadcast have painted pictures of themselves as dangerous strikers who are allergic to anything that happens on the mat and because of that their differences are being overlooked by many heading into this weekend. Defending champ Velasquez is one who should be more than happy to turn the contest into a grappling competition as he left an amateur wrestling legacy of sheer domination behind when he graduated from Arizona State, we just haven’t really gotten to see much of it lately. He ambushed and flattened Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira in just over two minutes. Then, in winning the title from Brock Lesnar, we got a small spoonful of it as he had to use those skills to get out from under Lesnar’s notorious ground and pound, but once he did that he fell back on his heavy hands to finish the fight.
Dos Santos, meanwhile, is basically a stand up warrior built from the ground up. In fact, I didn’t even know that he knew what a takedown was until he hit an overtly theatrical one on an already bloodied and humiliated Shane Carwin which served as the cherry atop his UFC 131 victory. But his magic doesn’t so much lie in his boxing but in the way he makes sure that the fight never sticks to the ground. Two fights ago he took on the always formidable Roy Nelson, a man who loves to take his enormous girth and turn it into an avalanche under which he buries his opposition (see: Kimbo Slice). But thanks to some fantastic sprawling it took Nelson less that a round to figure out that even a Big Country sized gut was no match for the defensive techniques of dos Santos leaving him no choice but to stand there and bang and lose.
That said, the scouting reports are even more bullish on dos Santos’ hips and his ability to escape from the bottom and that should serve as the high dramatic point of the fight. What will happen, exactly, once Velasquez double legs dos Santos and flattens him out? I’d love to say that dos Santos will pop right back and up and re-engage Velasquez in the 5 round stand up war Dana White is so praying for but how am I to know that to be true? We’ve never really seen his ground game in action against anything even resembling high level competition and opponents don’t get any tougher than what he’ll have to deal with this weekend. It is also worth remembering that maybe dos Santos shouldn’t be all that enthused about a boxing match breaking out either. Of course he’s good but he is not a finisher, per se, whereas Velasquez is in every sense of the word.
So where does that leave somebody looking to lay a little coin on dos Santos? I would say that while the +170 line he has been granted is generous it is still a risky proposition especially because he simply does not have an easy path to victory. The best I could come up with is that if the fight goes to decision then it probably works to his advantage. His cardio is a little better (in my opinion) and his style plays out well over the long haul. His striking is sharper and can pick somebody apart over the course of a fight. But what are his chances of surviving the whole 25 minutes. Obviously the real danger lies in the opening 10 as Velasquez is a beast who will be looking for the jugular early and often. He’s coming off first round stoppages over two of the most feared heavyweights in MMA history and he has knocked out 8 of his 9 victims (damn you Cheick Kongo!!) over the course of his career. I like Velasquez in this fight but am scared to take a strong stand on it. Velasquez could easily whack the wrong part of dos Santos’ head and break his hand or have any number of other mishaps happen during the bout that would swing things in the other direction. What the UFC does best is provide main events in which we the fans are really expected to be utterly perplexed heading in and they have done it again, only this time we are lucky enough to have it given away for free on network TV.
