UFC 299 Technical Breakdown: The secret to Sean O'Malley's success

How the bantamweight king bewildered his rival and avenged his only loss.

An Accurate Prediction?

I have had the privilege to avoid having to make pre-fight predictions for a long time. While it can be fun to theorize about what it might look like when two skilled fighters finally trade blows in the cage, many analysts will agree that it is often much more enjoyable to break down fights after the fact.

There are often too many variables and too many unknowns in this chaotic sport to feel confident about your predictions. We’re often forced to hedge our bets or qualify our picks with numerous contingencies so as not to seem like we’re putting all our eggs in one basket.

However, there’s little that beats the feeling of getting it right. Luckily for me, my first written preview for this newsletter has aged well. My entire premise was that surely Sean O’Malley would be able to replicate the success Cory Sandhagen had feinting Marlon Vera into a defensive shell. As we’ll see, that’s exactly what happened.

Feinting for Free

There’s a lot of components to O’Malley’s dynamic offense, but in my estimation it’s his feints that are the most foundational. As mentioned in the preview, O’Malley is a sharpshooter who wants to stay at range and set his opponents up for big, dynamic moments of striking offense. It was his feints that allowed him to stay in his comfort zone for the entire fight.

First, O’Malley needed to use his feints to find the range and positioning inside the cage he needed to dictate the terms of engagement. Vera was by no means intent on pressuring O’Malley, but against fighters with less astute cagecraft Vera has been able to walk opponents down. O’Malley’s style demands plenty of space to move, but Vera was never able to take that away from him because O’Malley effectively used his feints to circle away from the fence.

O’Malley’s first order of business was to claim for himself the real-estate he needed in the cage to be able to get his game going. He did that by using his feints to allow him to safely circle away from the fence.

Having claimed the space he needed, O’Malley got to work using his feints to draw out reactions. This is where things really started to go downhill for Vera. Just like against Sandhagen, Vera got stuck playing the game of guessing which strike was real and which one was fake, all the while O’Malley was gathering information about Vera’s defense so he could find routes around it.

O’Malley used his feints to see how Vera was going to respond defensively to threats.

It’s a tough dilemma for Vera because people often criticize MMA fighters for their lack of defense and he was doing his best to stay defensively responsible, but there comes a point where you have to start punishing the feints. It’s a death sentence to stand in front of a sharpshooter like O’Malley and let him keep feinting.

Even just limiting his reactions to the feints wouldn’t have been enough. He needed to actually punish O’Malley for it by firing off various counters. It’s important to not respond predictably to feints, so if Vera had responded to the jab feints every time with a low kick, eventually, O’Malley would punish him for that. But ultimately the problem is that Vera was throwing very little, instead letting O’Malley’s feints force him into a defensive shell.

Punishing the Reactions

So what did O’Malley do with all these feints? It’s one thing to use them to cover your movement, but feints themselves don’t score. O’Malley was keen to start taking advantage of his constantly flinching opponent by forcing certain defensive reactions and then stabbing his punches into the gaps those reactions created.

The biggest read that O’Malley was able to capitalize on was just how much of Vera’s defensive moves left his body an open target. That made this simple sequence one of O’Malley’s most consistent and impactful throughout the whole fight: feinting a jab or rear hand to draw up the arms and then lancing Vera in the body with a rear straight.

O’Malley’s most effective way to build off the success of his feints was by using them to set up body shots.

Given that Vera so heavily prioritized guarding against head strikes, O’Malley did find it difficult to land his rear hand cleanly there. That was not how I felt watching live as it looked like O’Malley was slicing through the guard rather easily, but while revisiting many of those moments I noticed that Vera had done a decent job catching a lot of the power shots on his guard or ducking down to make the punches land on his iron skull. As we’ll see later, it was O’Malley’s jab that was most consistently able to find the opening.

Still, Vera gave O’Malley plenty of opportunities to find ways to land headshots. Mostly that was through O’Malley drawing out the parry with a jab feint and then sending his rear straight down the pipe. But who could forget the thunderous sound of O’Malley’s second round knee straight to Vera’s head? That was set up with a subtle feint that got Vera to duck down and cover up.

Vera’s catch-all defense was often to cover up and duck down, looking to hide his chin and force O’Malley to land on his arms or the hard parts of his skull. However, O’Malley was able to use this reaction to set up a devastating knee.

What happened to Vera’s kicks?

If there is one thing you would have expected Vera to take away from his first fight with O’Malley it would be that he needed to kick O’Malley’s legs early and often. But Vera was ineffectual with his kicks and, despite landing a few, never troubled O’Malley with them.