I say Usman standing in front of Edwards for 90 seconds flat footed
He was up 4 rounds to 1 and just needed to kill the clock to get his 16th straight win in the UFC, and his 6th title defense
Instead he was comfortable with his boring victory and decided to stand in front of edwards for 90 seconds. No footwork. No movement. No faints. No jabs. No nothing
Then paid the ultimate sacrifice for his laziness
He was on a 15 fight win streak in the ufc and was about to tie or break Anderson Silva’s win streak record. Instead he got KO’d and is currently on a 3 fight losing streak
All Andre Soukhamthat had to do to beat Sean O’Malley was stand up. He had minutes in the third round to stand up and walk away from an injured O’Malley and he didn’t do it. Had money on it and it was one of the more frustrating MMA moments of my life.
I probably would never count, in this question/answer, anybody fighting possibly the top fighter of all-time. That type of fight will make you try stupid things, because we all watched everyone try everything and get merked by Fedor.
Nah, Usman won almost all of his title fights with striking. Just because what worked for years stopped working as he got older doesn’t make the strategy stupid to an all-time level. IMO, for that level, you need to do something that even a casual knows is going to result in an L BEFORE the fight happens. (think holly trying to grapple with Kayla or Conor talking about Khabib’s family.)
I know we all knew Ian was a threat and very good, but we didn’t know if he’d be able to outstrike Usman.
To that point, Usman did outstrike him for 99% of the fight, except for the part that ended it. So he wa the better striker for the entire fight until he got caught. So it’s ok to say he was stupid because that would eventually happen, but it makes it a lot less dumb than all-time worst. It’s not even in the conversation, imo.
