Angles and Jabs: TJ Dillashaw Protects His Crown

If insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results, Renan Barão is mad as a march hare.

Delusion is a keystone in building a great fighter: he has to believe that he can beat anyone in the world at his weight. Perhaps at any weight. But when a loss eventually comes that same self-belief turns into a stumbling block. If the only reason a fighter can ever see himself losing is because he wasn't in peak condition, or he was going through some personal stuff, that fighter is unlikely to ever achieve the quality exclusive to the greatest fighters—adaptation after a loss.

T.J. Dillashaw tore Renan Barão apart in their first match because he fought smarter, kept turning the champion, kept him swinging at air with feints, used superior head movement against Barão's complete lack of the same to win head-to-head exchanges, and did the majority of his best work after switching to a southpaw stance.

Barão apparently went away and didn't take note of any of this, nor did Barão amend the punching form which saw him get lit up in every exchange. The talk coming into this bout was of a furious, motivated Renan Barão, and I don't doubt that he was, but working as hard as you can in the wrong direction is just time wasted.

The first round wasn't Dillashaw's best showing—absent were the feints which affected Barão in the first bout. In fact, there was little of the matador and plenty of the bull in Dillashaw through the first five minutes. But from round two onwards, it was another selection from T.J. Dillashaw's Greatest Hits. More than that, while the onus was on Barão to improve and change in order to avenge his loss, Dillashaw showed some newly tuned additions to his game.

Where in the first bout it was Dillashaw's sneaky left straight from a southpaw stance which jarred Barão, this time he showed an excellent southpaw jab for which Barão seemed to have no answer. One has to wonder if Barão himself was buying into the "I just got caught with an overhand, the rest of the fight didn't really count" narrative. His left hand remained nailed to his head at all times, even when Dillashaw switched to southpaw. Where there should be a messy hand fight preventing the easy landing of jabs from the southpaw vs. orthodox set up, Barão's high and wide lead hand meant Dillashaw could just throw the southpaw jab straight inside of it.

Dillashaw found creative ways to get to that inside angle. One that he has demonstrated a couple of times is a decoy overhand or right straight from orthodox, performing Eddie Alvarez's 'dart' into southpaw and coming in from forty five degrees with the jab. There are three things which make this inside angle, and this set up in particular, especially beautiful.

The first is that in a fighting stance, the opponent's center line is turned away from the front, normally at about forty five degrees, but ranging according to how side on he stands. Square on fighters—normally the lead hook happy sluggers—present a lot of target. By moving to an angle between Barão's legs—making his angle of attack line up with Barão's belly button—Dillashaw made sure he had lots of target to aim at with no guard in front of it in the form of elbows or shoulders.

Second is that the dart takes Dillashaw away from Barão's left hook, taking some of the heat off of it if it does catch him, and past the right straight. Third is that where jabbing against a southpaw normally means working at a disadvantage against a very short parry from the opponent's lead hand, Barão cannot reach his left hand across to his right side and parry Dillashaw's jab over his right shoulder very easily at all. Every defense is designed for an opponent directly in front of the fighter, if he can't keep his man in front of him, a fighter is in all kinds of trouble.

Dillashaw also employed the similar sort of shift to the opposite side in and attempt to land a left hook. The idea that Dillashaw, or any fighter, is truly ambidextrous in their abilities is far from the truth—but it was good to see him threatening this angle from both stances and on both sides. For more on the principle of angling check out my brand new release, Finding the Art.

Now all this jabbing isn't to say the left straight wasn't there. Here's a nice instance where Dillashaw steps back from his southpaw stance, as if to switch to orthodox, before jumping in as a southpaw again with a venomous left straight.

It has been said that the only real control one has over the opponent is in getting him to step forward. If you take a step back, he can't very well take a step back as well. Well, he could, but it would be going against every instinct he has, would encourage boos from the crowd, and just won't help him win the fight. Dillashaw continued to use this measured back tracking to walk Barão onto punches—notably this Balmoral Special. A switch which was the trademark of Ray Sefo.

Once Dillashaw got his feints going again, it started to get considerably easier. Barão has always loaded up on one shot at a time, normally attempting to time opponents as they step in, this makes him an ideal opponent to feint against. Throwing and missing hard blows takes energy, feinting barely takes any. There really is no reason that more fighters shouldn't be working on and applying feints constantly in bouts, and yet so few do.

Now, Renan Barão is a world-class fighter, but outside of his jab his boxing has always been woeful. Back in 2012 we were talking about how he gets hit and starts swinging wild—just as against Brad Pickett and Scott Jorgensen. Elbows wide and high, chin out on a platter, bent forward at the waist so that he can't generate power. Last night this was more obvious than ever. But where usually it is only when he starts trying to put together combinations that Barão looks sloppy and wild, he looked like he was paddling a kayak with almost every punch he made against Dillashaw at the weekend.

Furthermore, Barão—who I used to say had one of the nicest jabs in the division when he stuck to that and that alone—was dropping his lead hand after every punch and getting clocked in return every time.

In fact, Barão threw himself off balance so often and so predictably with every attempted counter swing, Dillashaw nearly knocked him out several times with the same high kick which did the damage in the first fight.

The finish came as Dillashaw drew and exchange and used his head movement—and Barão's complete lack of it—to land the solid blows. It was a shifting-weaving left hook, the kind which Igor Vovchanchyn liked to throw off the right low kick, which wobbled the Brazilian.

And from there it was all Dillashaw as Barão tried to swing to hide his injuries, just as he did when he was stopped in the first fight.

I hold Renan Barão in tremendously high regard—in fact, I thought it was downright unfair that the UFC made him defend the interim title twice while desperately hoping for Dominick Cruz to return and set up that old champion versus champion angle—but to be honest, he looked like a shell of himself. Not only did he fail to improve or adapt to what Dillashaw had already shown him, and seem completely bamboozled by the new parts of Dillashaw's game, he was making basic technical errors which he has never previously made, and seemed exhausted by the end of the second round.

Speculate irresponsibly on why that might be, but to be honest Mitch Gagnon boxed him up pretty well through most of their fight too. After last night's performance I am struggling to get my head around the idea that Renan Barão trains with the same coaches as the constantly improving and technically beautiful Jose Aldo on a day-to-day basis.

Dillashaw, meanwhile, answered all the questions. There's no more pretending it was fluke, or that he's some unproven commodity. The man continues to grow technically and strategically (though there were signs of a little over-eagerness to exchange in the first round, quickly brought under control by his corner). Frankly, he deserves to be one of the UFC's top draws, but if they continue to put him on TV for free, he'll likely do wonders for the sport.

Pick up Jack's new kindle book, Finding the Art, or find him at his blog, Fights Gone By.