UFC 301 Technical Breakdown: Why mixing it up isn't always necessary

Steve Erceg wanted to show his well-rounded skillset, and it probably cost him the belt.

Tough Matchup

The title of my preview article was “Steve Erceg is a tough fight for Alexandre Pantoja”, and after watching it, that feels like an understatement. I was not alone in seeing the stylistic difficulties Erceg posed and if you read the staff picks, you know that there was a considerable split among careful observers of the sport.

Despite picking Erceg as the winner, I’m happy knowing that at least the fight was as close as I predicted:

I’m expecting an outcome that’s pretty similar to Pantoja’s last fight with Moreno where it goes to decision and the judges are split on some rounds because they have to make a tough call between the grappling control of Pantoja and striking success of Erceg.

Maybe it’s ludicrous to choose the champion fighting in his home country to be on the losing end of a decision like that, but that’s what I’m doing.

Steve Erceg by split decision.

However, there’s a lot more in fight analysis than picking winners. In fact, my friend and longtime MMA analyst, writer, and bettor Dan Tom pointed out to me that “picks, analysis and bets are all different things.”

Now that the fight has happened, this is where analysis can take the front seat. We need to try to understand in what specific ways Erceg proved to be a tough matchup for Pantoja and we need to understand what went wrong for him.

Charging Champions

As expected, Pantoja came out of the gate immediately charging at Erceg and looking to take him down. He does this in a lot of his fights, and while his telegraphed and lunging takedowns rarely work in the opening moments of the fight, his blitzes are his way of quickly grasping the initiative.

Erceg had a specific response planned to deal with Pantoja’s blitzes: the counter left hook. His retreating footwork would naturally cause a weight transfer from his lead leg to his rear leg, which mechanically works well with pulling a left hook across.

Pantoja is also incredibly vulnerable while he’s charging forward, dropping his hands to his waist before throwing and squaring up his stance as he brings his rear foot up forward to more quickly cover distance.

Pantoja’s method of dealing with Erceg’s range striking advantage was to blitz forward, looking to swarm him and push him back to the fence for takedowns. Erceg kept running him into counter left hooks.

While Erceg was able to catch Pantoja cleanly several times with the counter left hook, there were a couple aspects that made this tactic less than ideal. First, he was mostly using the left hook while moving linearly rearward, which meant ultimately he was conceding space.

If your response to a pressuring opponent involves retreating straight back, eventually you’ll get run into the fence. Perhaps a better option to fix this issue would have been a check hook, which involves pivoting with the counter left hook.

Second, even when he landed the counter left hook, Pantoja’s iron chin allowed him to be undeterred in his pressure. While the left hook is a shot more likely to knock out an opponent who is rushing in, if Erceg instead ran Pantoja into stiff jabs it would have halted Pantoja’s forward momentum more easily.

Combining the two aspects, a pivot jab would likely have been the best anti-pressure weapon. It’s just harder to run through a straight punch like a jab because the force of the strike is in the opposite direction of the pressuring fighter’s movement, giving it a lot more stopping power.

Erceg’s jab was certainly a factor in this fight as we’ll see later, but Pantoja’s major plan for dealing with it was his low kicks. Several times when Erceg stepped in to jab, Pantoja countered him hard with low kicks to his planted lead leg.

The problem for Pantoja was