UFC 172 made history thanks to the dominance of Jon “Bones” Jones against Glover Teixeira.
ESPN Stats & Info broke it down for fans:
Let’s take a look at his impressive victory, as well as some of the other results from UFC 172.
Jones Dominates
Jones improved his record to 20-1 and was never challenged by Teixeira over the course of five rounds in Baltimore. All three judges scored the contest in favor of Jones, 50-45, in what was a much more dominating performance than his last fight against Alexander Gustafsson.
Jones commented on the fight afterward, via Brett Okamoto of ESPN.com: "It was a lot of improv. Game plan was to stick takedowns and pick him apart from a distance. I realized he was winding up on his punches so I switched game plans and fought at extremely close range. It worked out great."
Jones controlled the entire fight with his 84” reach and never gave Teixeira much of a chance.
In fact, the fans even started to boo Teixeira in the fifth round when his mouthpiece fell out.
After such a dominating performance, it’s only natural for Jones to look ahead, especially since he nearly lost to Gustafsson in his previous bout.
Of particular interest is the fact that the UFC is considering taking that fight to Sweden.
Considering how close the Swede came to knocking off Jones in their previous fight, any edge that the home crowd provides would be huge. Gustafsson would likely come out energized and perhaps even take control of the match in the early going.
However, crowd support can’t do anything about Jones’ reach and overall athletic ability. He will learn from his last fight with Gustafsson and likely add onto his historically great resume in the process.
Luke Rockhold Impresses
Jones’ victory was the headline of Saturday’s action, but Luke Rockhold looked dominant as well when he made quick work of Tim Boetsch.
In fact, Rockhold notched a victory in slightly more than two minutes, which was one of the fastest wins of his career. The magnitude of the stage gave the former Strikeforce middleweight champion a sizable audience to impress, and that is exactly what he did.
Rockhold thrilled fans by submitting Boetsch via kimura on the way to an easy win.
Anthony Johnson Destroys Phil Davis
In the fight before the main event, Anthony Johnson gave fans a taste of what they were about to see from Jones when he destroyed Phil Davis.
Johnson is a 205-pound specimen who mixes power and wrestling ability better than the majority of fighters in the sport. Gregg Doyel of CBS Sports deemed Johnson’s performance to be a beatdown:
Johnson won 30-27 on every scorecard and stuffed all eight of Davis’ takedown attempts.
No comments:
Post a Comment