In a post-UFC 109 interview done by Mike Straka, Jon Fitch made quite a bold statement. Fitch stated that the closed guard in MMA was "dead." He said that unless you're Shinya Aoki or Demian Maia, if you get taken down by a strong wrestler, you need to get back to feet or suffer a beating.
While that may rattle a few within the jiu jitsu community, he's completely correct. Over the years we've seen MMA evolve many times. While some feel that the sport is largely the same and has been since the institution of the Unified Rules, fans who really look at fights from just a few short years ago, and compare to fights now, will notice quite a few changes.
For one, the mount is no longer the most dominant position to finish a fight. I can't remember the last time a fight was finished with strikes from the mount position. Side control seems to be the preferred position to finish off opponents.
Made famous by Ivan Salavary (as Joe Rogan loves to remind us of this, but I feel Matt Hughes popularized it further), trapping the arms of your opponent in side control, and then raining down blows to the face gives much less space for escape. Even if you don't land significant blows, the referee is forced to stop the fight because you can't escape.
At this point, the mount is fairly low percentage. As we saw with Phil Davis and Brian Stann, the trend these days when mounted is to simply give up your back and hang on to the gloves of your opponent, then hope you can explode over into their guard and reverse momentum that way. Sure, Davis didn't have the best mount, but the survival techniques showed by Stann (guy really needs to practice the hip escape, though) are now likely common practice at all the top teams in MMA.
The guard is in trouble for sure. I agree completely with Fitch, and feel that unless you are a top submission artist, the caliber of Demian Maia, Ronaldo "Jacare" Souza, Shinya Aoki, Dustin Hazelett, or Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, having a top wrestler in your guard is death.
At the top level, wrestlers are so good at submission defense, as we saw with Chael Sonnen, they no longer have any fear of the guard. Nate Marquardt is a black belt in jiu jitsu, but could get nothing done against Sonnen from inside his guard and paid the price for it.
Jon Fitch has made a career of being inside a tough BJJ black belt's guard and surviving. Tito Ortiz made a name for himself for punishing guys inside the guard as well, and the list of wrestlers who do so just grows more and more by the day. I don't think I even need to discuss the problems that could arise should you find a monster wrestler like Shane Carwin or Brock Lesnar in your guard (Minotauro Nogueira is a brave, brave man).
But the big story of UFC 109 was Nate Marquardt being battered from inside his guard by Chael Sonnen. I think the next evolution in MMA is the rubber guard becoming common practice for everyone involved. We're still seeing 1997 style guards in 2010. It just doesn't work in MMA anymore.
The rubber guard was designed to control fighters from within your guard, break down their posture, and look for submissions from unusual places using flexibility. Anyone familiar with Shinya Aoki's handiwork has seen him perform breathtaking submissions (literally) from the rubber guard.
The problem is that a lot of fighters, who aren't necessarily raised in the discipline of BJJ from the start, don't necessarily have the flexibility. Dustin Hazelett's submission of Tamdon McCrory at UFC 91 was the last time I saw the rubber guard used effectively in the UFC. Generally, we see fighters feebly attempt to grab their ankles, only after having sustained a beating, and then they realize after a few tries that they haven't practiced this technique nearly enough, so they wind up giving up.
Unless a meteor hits the UFC, and wipes out all its elite wrestlers, we're going to be in for a long reign of terror by wrestlers. Couture vs. Coleman wasn't the only indication that we're back in 1997, folks, because the guard in MMA has been rendered almost completely ineffective at the top level.
[Jon Fitch photo credit Wade Keller (c) MMATorch]
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