Nobody feels worse about Jack Della Maddalena’s performance at UFC 322 than the former welterweight champion after he was unable to produce almost any offense against Islam Makhachev while giving up four takedowns and over 19 minutes of control time on the ground.
It was a dramatically different outing from the fight where Della Maddalena won the title by thwarting Belal Muhammad at every turn and ultimately winning a decision. On Saturday, Della Maddalena didn’t stop a single takedown and only landed 18 significant strikes during the five-round battle.
While there’s probably plenty of blame going around right now about what went wrong, UFC legend Matt Brown grew increasingly frustrated listening to Della Maddalena’s coaches in his corner attempting to motivate him between rounds but rarely offering any technical advice.
“It seemed very odd to me like they were just trying to fire him up the whole time,” Brown said on the latest episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer. “I said he could be as fired up as he wants, if he doesn’t start doing something different, it’s not going to help. He’s fighting hard as hell. He’s grimacing the whole time. He’s squeezing as hard as he can, fighting against those submissions as hard as he can. The guy is giving it his all. Telling him to give it more is not going to help a single thing. If anything, tell him to relax a little bit.
“One of the things I’m big on with cornering, it’s very difficult to stay in the moment. We always think about what happened in the last round. I think it’s a lot like golf. You can’t worry about where you just hit the ball. You have to worry about where you’re going to hit the ball next to get closer to the pin. If you’re sitting there thinking about your last shot, you’re just mentally f*cking yourself.”
Brown criticized his coaches on Twitter saying “terrible cornering” and while he wasn’t trying to pile onto an already miserable situation, he just didn’t understand the philosophy during the fight.
Instead, Brown heard Della Maddalena’s coaches shouting a lot without really trying to strategize a way to actually win the fight or produce a Hail Mary comeback in the closing moments.
“I would have loved to hear them say ‘hey, Jack sprawl your legs back when he comes in for a shot, stay heavy, have your hips heavy.’ Something along those lines,” Brown said. “Whether it would have helped or not, who knows. It’s one of those things, we don’t have any idea the dynamic between them as friends, their relationship as coaches. I try not to hate too much but in the moment when I was hearing it, and I posted on Twitter, it was just driving me nuts. I can’t listen to this.
“This is not the way you corner a guy at a high level. You’re in a championship fight against potentially the greatest of all-time, certainly one of the greatest of all-time. He’s absolutely in that conversation now. He has the potential to be the greatest of all-time. That’s not how you talk to a guy in the corner. He’s already the champion. He’s motivated to go out there and win the fight.”
Brown did give credit to Della Maddalena’s grappling coach Craig Jones, who he heard trying to give him some technical pointers between rounds, but even that wasn’t exactly the best possible strategy to stop Makhachev from repeatedly taking the fight to the ground.
“I remember the one round Craig Jones came into the octagon, gave him a little bit of actual advice,” Brown said. “I don’t remember which was which but earlier in between rounds, it was Craig Jones and later on it was whatever other coach. Craig Jones was trying to give him real advice. It would be interesting to hear Craig’s take on that or his coaches’ take.
“I’d like to hear what they have to say, not just beat a dead horse on people that can’t defend themselves. I would like to hear their opinion, their thoughts on what their corner strategy was or what they were thinking or what they were trying to say.”
As far as the actual strategy in the fight, Brown saw shades of a mistake he made during his own career reflected in what Della Maddalena was trying to do against Makhachev.
Rather than making a concerted effort to shut down Makhachev’s wrestling, Della Maddalena appeared solely focused on playing defense off his back and preventing any submissions from putting him in too much danger.
That game plan paid off because Della Maddalena didn’t get finished, but he also failed to really do any damage to Makhachev during a 25-minute fight.
“What it appeared just from the outside looking in and Jack is an amazing fighter, don’t want to take anything away from him, but what it appeared, he trained a lot to defend jiu-jitsu of Islam and survive,” Brown said. “It was amazing how he survived those submission attempts. Islam went for a few really good submission attempts and Jack was very crisp on his defense. It seemed like that was what he trained the most. Of course we have no idea, we’re just speculating but it did not appear he trained his wrestling much because he did not give hardly any resistance at all to Islam’s wrestling.
“I’ll tell you I made a similar mistake. When I fought Demian Maia, I did the exact same thing. I trained so much to defend Demian’s rear-naked choke specifically but other things too. What happened was, I ended up with him having my back most of the fight, and I defended it most of the fight. Actually, the only reason I ended up getting caught is I went for a kamikaze escape, 30 seconds left, you already lost the fight, nothing to lose but that was really the story of the fight. It felt to me like Jack made the same mistake that I made. I focused on what my opponent was doing and how to defend their offense versus how do I get some offense myself? But particularly with Jack just defending the wrestling. I was really surprised at how easy it was for Islam a lot of the times.”
Brown admits giving credit where credit is due that Makhachev just seemed like a different kind of animal than anything Della Maddalena or his coaches were prepared to deal with this past Saturday night.
Once the downward spiral started, it didn’t stop until the fight was over.
“I tell you what it felt like to me, he had never felt someone like Islam before,” Brown said. “I don’t know who is in his camp. Craig Jones is a jiu-jitsu guy. One of the greatest of all time jiu-jitsu guys but that’s not Islam. It felt like he had never felt that kind of pressure before and wasn’t really sure how to handle it. It seemed like he had taken for granted his ability to get up.
“He certainly defended the submissions very well and you could see him trying many different ways, some clear Craig Jones ways of trying to stand up like octopus guard and different things like that. But it felt like he didn’t realize what he was in for. That speaks nothing but volumes about Islam Makhachev. The guy is something special, and there’s probably not that many people that have felt that kind of pressure before.”
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