A couple of comments in a post earlier today caught my attention in regards to Fedor Emelianenko's ground game, so I did some quick research. We all know that Fedor transitions really well, has extremely quick hips, and has a large number of submission wins to his credit. However, I want to pose the question. Is Emelianenko's submission game really great, or has he just subbed a lot of guys with poor submission defense. Here's a list of all the guys that Fedor has subbed. Note, I've omitted submissions caused by strikes so he has 15 legit submission wins. Check it:
-Mark Coleman (2x)(5 submission losses out of 10 career losses)
-Kevin Randleman(7 submission losses out of 15 career losses)
-Choi(2 submission losses out of 3 career MMA losses)
-Matt Lindland(3 submission losses out of 7 career losses)
-Mark Hunt(5 submission losses out of 6 career MMA losses)
-Tim Sylvia(4 submission losses out of 6 career losses)
-Fujita(2 submission losses out of 9 career losses)
-Valavicius(5 submission losses out of 7 career losses)
-Hasdell(7 submission losses out of 17 career losses)
-Schall(3 submission losses out of 11 career losses)
-Lagvilava
-Lazarov
The last two guys I couldn't find the info on, but that happened so long ago it's pretty irrelevant anyways. In a video I posted up yesterday, Fedor said that he would be comfortable grappling with BJJ ace Fabricio Werdum. A lot of fans point to the Fedor's fights with Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Nogueira's fight with Werdum as reasons to believe that Fedor can hang with Werdum on the ground. While Nogueira may have been able to implement his BJJ game into MMA better, all of those fights were quite some time ago. So there's no reason to believe that Werdum hasn't used the past 3-4 years to implement his BJJ better in regards to MMA. We also have to take into account that Fedor spent the majority of his time in top position against Nogueira. So looking at the stats above, it appears that almost all of Fedor's submission wins came against guys with pretty poor submission defense relatively speaking. What happens if Werdum gets top position on the ground against Fedor? Could we see a repeat of Werdum/Gonzaga or Werdum/Vera?
SBN coverage of Strikeforce and M-1 Global: Fedor vs. Werdum
Loading comments...