Nate Diaz may not have won a shiny new belt by tapping featherweight champion Conor McGregor on Saturday night at UFC 196, but he did crown himself the king of the moneyweight fighters.
Miesha Tate did walk away with the title after choking Holly Holm into unconsciousness with little more than a minute left in the final frame. By doing so, she validated a long career spent reaching just shy of the best in the world.
Both Tate and Diaz were substantial underdogs, with the pride of Stockton closing as high as plus-400 and Tate around plus-250.
How did they pull off the upsets?
Holly Holm vs. Miesha Tate
Tate has never set the world on fire with her athleticism, but she's durable, smart, makes great adjustments mid-fight and above all is a vastly underrated grappler.
There are few MMA fighters better at exploiting their opponents' split-second mistakes than Tate. Holm didn't give her many opportunities and largely succeeded at keeping the challenger on the end of her rangy punches and kicks, but Tate made the most of the two real chances she had, likely scoring a 10-8 round in the second and finding an unlikely rear-naked choke finish in the fifth and final frame.
For the rest of the fight, Tate's intelligence and savvy kept her in it even during the long stretches in which Holm was able to establish her preferred distance. Both fighters had to make consistent adjustments to the other as the fight wore on, a constant back-and-forth of move and counter-move that eventually left Tate one step ahead in the final round.
"Just make sure that after you're striking, you're exiting," Greg Jackson told Holm in the corner after the first round, "because when you commit forward, she doesn't have a lot of technique, but she's just bombing," referring to Tate's willingness to throw counters as Holm came forward.
At the beginning of the second frame, Holm followed Jackson's instructions, cutting a slick angle and circling out after her first combination of the round. Instead of countering the second blitz with punches, as she had done in the first round, Tate changed levels, grabbed a body lock and finished with a trip, which led to her extended dominance and near-finish on the ground.
Holm somehow survived the round, responding in the third and fourth by doing a much-better job of establishing and maintaining her preferred long range.
Her movement and angles were sharper, and she started to finish her combinations with long-range strikes to reestablish distance after she threw her power shots. Holm's side kick and jab were particularly effective, leaving Tate too far outside to hit reactive takedowns like the one that led to her long period of control on the ground in the second round.
Even in the fourth round, however, when it looked like Tate had no answers left for Holm's movement and rangy striking, Tate never quit looking for her moment. She tried counterpunches, especially the left hook over the top of Holm's right, caught kicks, got in on a takedown near the fence and used her own underrated footwork to prevent herself from being a sitting duck for Holm's blitzes.
The fifth round started much the same way, with Holm landing shots at long range and keeping Tate away while stuffing a couple of takedown attempts. The opportunity that led to the rear-naked choke finish didn't come out of nowhere, though.
Tate had been looking for a level change and shot as a counter to Holm's straight left for the entire round. Just before Holm threw her left hand, Tate measured the distance with her jab and then took a small step forward. When Holm committed to the punch, Tate changed levels and was able to grab ahold of the body lock before spinning to the back.
Tate had gauged the range and therefore knew that Holm would be close enough to get in on the takedown and the finish that had eluded her earlier in the fight came shortly thereafter.
There are a few underlying threads to Tate's victory. First, she never conceded any part of the fight to Holm. Rather than avoiding long range or the pocket in favor of madly rushing forward as Ronda Rousey did, Tate was patient. She repeatedly measured distance with her jab, threw kicks and let Holm throw combinations at her, which she then countered with punches or level changes.
Second, Tate's timing on her counters was spot-on all night. She nailed Holm with counters in every round and used the threat of those punches to keep Holm's hands high after she threw punches. That opened up her reactive takedowns, allowing her to get deeper onto the body lock or Holm's hips on a shot than she could in open space.
Third, the challenger never quit. That's easier said than done, and it's not hard to underestimate its importance. Tate lost huge chunks of the fight, but she never let herself get frustrated and never sold out to get a desperation takedown.
Instead, she stuck to her game plan, made adjustments and eventually capitalized on a momentary opening that she had spent the entire fight trying to set up. That kind of relentlessness and ice-cold demeanor under pressure is a rare commodity indeed, and it's a testament to Tate's greatness.
Conor McGregor vs. Nate Diaz
"I'm not surprised, motherf--ker," said Nate Diaz (warning: NSFW language) after Herb Dean raised his hand in victory. In hindsight, perhaps we shouldn't have been, either.
The first round went much as expected. McGregor's advantages in speed, power and diversity were all on display as he landed oblique kicks at will and showed off some new pocket boxing skills that he had been preparing for lightweight champion Rafael Dos Anjos. His pressure was on point, and he landed powerful combinations whenever he backed Diaz to the fence.
Counter lefts landed cleanly and consistently, and he even finished the round by sweeping Diaz after a brief takedown and landing a couple of hard shots from top position.
There were some warning signs in the first, though. Diaz's height and reach were already problems for McGregor, and the Irishman came up short on far more punches than we're used to seeing from him.
The American got his lengthy jab working at various points, and he landed a few counter right hooks both as and after McGregor threw his straight left. A caught kick turned into an easy single-leg takedown for Diaz.
Above all, it was clear McGregor was perfectly content to fight at Diaz's pace, and as the round wore on, he threw fewer kicks and grew more content to headhunt.
All of these things came back to haunt McGregor in the second. The series of hard punches he landed in the first two minutes of the second round sucked him into a sort of tunnel vision, where the fact he was landing so cleanly seemed to make him think one more clean left hand would be the one to finally crack the American's chin.
Between the 4:00- and 3:00-minute marks of the second round—by my count—McGregor threw 26 punches, with most of them the kind of go-to-sleep shots that have leveled lesser fighters. It's not a coincidence that by the end of that minute, Diaz had his number, and the entire tenor of the fight changed.
Diaz landed a clean counter left hand as McGregor attempted a spinning back kick and then a hard one-two moments afterward. The Irishman, gassed by his efforts to finish the fight, no longer had the energy necessary to explode inside past Diaz's reach or to keep his head moving as actively as he did early in the fight.
Stuck at the end of Diaz's reach without the energy to get inside or to avoid the steady diet of punches—by my count, the Stockton native threw just shy of 30 strikes between the 3:00- and 2:00-minute points of the second—McGregor wilted. Diaz poured it on with a burst of dirty boxing in the clinch, ate a McGregor combination, came back with one of his own and forced McGregor into a desperation takedown.
The brief ground exchange that followed led to Diaz sweeping an exhausted, rocked McGregor, taking his back and then finishing with a rear-naked choke.
What lessons can we take—about both McGregor and Diaz—from the nearly nine minutes of this fight?
First, height and reach matter. McGregor is a big, rangy featheweight who fights long, but he's no more than an average-sized lightweight. Diaz is one of the longest fighters at 155 pounds with a 76" reach and uses every inch of it to his advantage. Even in the first round, he landed hard jabs, forcing McGregor to miss with a number of big left hands.
This was a substantial part of what led to the featherweight champion's fatigue in the second round. There's nothing more exhausting than swinging and missing, especially with some of the power shots McGregor threw. Having to cover an extra few inches of distance over and over likewise took its toll on the Irishman.
Second, this fight reinforced the basic point that it's a few steps beyond unwise to engage either Nate or Nick Diaz in his preferred style of fight. Nobody, from Robbie Lawler to Takanori Gomi to Paul Daley to Michael Johnson to Conor McGregor, has ever succeeded in standing directly in front of a Diaz brother and exchanging volume in the pocket or its fringes. It has always been the opponent who falls first.
The pace is simply too much for any fighter, even one who has historically had excellent cardio, to match. There's a viable way to beat either Nick or Nate on the feet, but it involves constant movement, angles, low kicks and maintaining the intense focus and discipline necessary to avoid being drawn into a high-volume firefight at boxing range.
On Saturday night, Nate ate McGregor's shots and stayed calm and confident, knowing that it would sting the Irishman's pride to not be able to get him out of there, particularly with blood streaming down the right side of his face. "He had some good punches," Diaz conceded after the fight, but he knew he'd pick up the volume as the fight went on. "It happened a little earlier than I expected."
Third, the fight once again calls into question McGregor's wrestling—especially grappling skills. Diaz, not exactly a strong wrestler, easily took him down with a single in the first round off a caught kick. In the second, McGregor had nothing to offer when Diaz swept and got on top after the desperation takedown.
Being gassed and stung by a multitude of punches had something to do with that, as did Nate Diaz's elite skills. With that said, there's no reason to be particularly confident in McGregor's takedown defense or defensive grappling skills in a rematch with Jose Aldo or title fights with top control artists of Frankie Edgar's or Rafael Dos Anjos' caliber.
This is more speculative, but there's something of the front-runner about McGregor. He can fight as long as necessary when he's in control of the pace and the range, as he was against Max Holloway, but when pressured and forced into a situation with which he's not comfortable, he's in trouble.
McGregor is a smart and dedicated fighter who deserves credit for stepping up on short notice against an opponent of Diaz's caliber. There are lessons to be learned here for the Irishman, and if past experience is any guide, he will make adjustments and come back stronger.
For now, however, it's enough to appreciate a pair of stunning upsets in all their complexity and gory glory.
