The Blueprint: 9.26.09: Able Against Cain

Posted by Patrick Mullin on 09.26.2009

Cain Velasquez is seen as the rising young star of the heavyweight division. For all his gifts and skills, does he have any weaknesses? Oh yeah, you know where this is going.

Welcome back loyal readers. This is Matt Morgan's favorite column in all of 411Mania.com, The Blueprint! We take the top names in MMA from rising stars to established champions and figure out what it takes to beat them. We got some good feedback from our last look at Cristiana "Cyborg" Santos, so let's dip into the mailbag before we get started.

The Mailbag:

From: Guest guest (Guest): "Dude, you owned in the comments response. Nice work. I like the article, but would've like to have seen some more of the Japanese ladies included in the list."

Thanks for the positive feedback, its always appreciated. While the most skilled fighters in women's MMA are for the most part of Japanese descent in my opinion, they're simply too small to pose a realistic threat to a no pun intended, machine like Cyborg. Megumi Fujii, Miko Matusmoto, Yuka Tsujii, Satoko Shinashi, Takayo Hashi, and Hisae Watanabe are all great fighters who got some much deserved attention from our very own Scott "Kuch" Kuczowski in his great article on women in MMA you should know. However none of them are bigger than 125 pounds and you simply can't afford to give away that much size to Cyborg, especially when your style is grappling oriented as all of these girls basically are.

From: Guest#9914 (Guest): "Lesnar is the undisputed HW champ of the UFC, some of you people need to get over your hate and admit that means something. If the champ sucks, then what does that say about the rest of the division? Are they not even professional fighters?

As for the women, I never thought Carano had a shot anyway. She was just a pretty face. I predict Miesha Tate will be the new female fighter everyone likes."

What hate for Brock did I show? I pointed out flaws in his game and the overstatement of the skills of his opponents. I think its foolish however to call the UFC heavyweight division anything close to good. The reason its "deep" is because there's no one good enough to take charge of it. Hopefully the winner of Brock/Carwin can refine their skills and become a dominant champion. But let's just take a quick look at our own top 5 out of the UFC's heavyweights.

Brock Lesnar - Still relatively inexperienced. One dimensional wrestler. Questionable chin and submission defense.

Big Nog - Feather fists. Struggles to take punches. Still no head movement. Had difficulty submitting a light heavyweight despite having his chokes completely cinched in.

Frank Mir - Made his name beating a Nog fresh off a hospital stay and a gift against Brock. What else has he done?

Randy Couture - Had to drop down to light heavy after not winning a heavyweight fight in two years.

Shane Carwin - Up and comer but doesn't have the name on his resume yet to truly know how good he could be.

There's your top 5. Guys who are either living off long faded glory, gifts, or are still unproven but win fights.

From: Guest#1276 (Guest): "Another thing that Cyborg struggles with is conditioning, I think is her opponent came in good shape, they would have a massive advanatge on the ground. Good article, I look forward to reading it.

One more thing, No real evidence to suggest that Lesner has a suspect chin. He took a knee from Mir and showed no real effects. Obviously when someone hits as hard as Carwin, it doesn't matter how hard your chin is but thats besides the point. I think Carwin is good but the fact that Lesner is a class above in wrestling should be too much for Carwin."

I'm not as big on Cyborg having a suspect gas tank as some others are. I've seen her go a hard three rounds to a decision and while she obviously got tired down the stretch she has the style where her opponents tend to get overwhelmed and just as tired as she is while also taking more punishment in the process.

No real evidence to suggest Brock has a suspect chin? He was visibly hurt by the striking of Randy Couture, who is no puncher. He also was hurt by Mir's right hand in their rematch, which was followed by the knee that allowed him to secure the takedown. He was visibly hurt, but was fortunate enough to be able to secure a position that allowed him to recover and do it while in dominant position no less. Being hurt by the striking of Couture is not a good sign at all for a heavyweight chin.

Okay, now that we've gotten the formalities out of the way let's get ready to as the worst ref in all of MMA would say, "Hook em up!" The man we're taking a look at this week is a part of the aforementioned weak UFC heavyweight division. The difference between he and the others we've talked about is that people seem to think this guy has the most potential and has all the tools and time to become a great heavyweight fighter. His name is Cain Velasquez. He's a former two time Division I All-American wrestler and has been training at the American Kickboxing Academy. His current record stands at an impressive 6-0, 5 wins by way of knockout, and is coming off of his biggest career victory with a dominant performance over Cheick Kongo.



1) Striking - A lot of wrestlers in MMA take a long time to refine their striking abilities. Its really not uncommon to see long time wrestlers begin their professional careers at striking based camps in order to become more well rounded fighters. We said that Cain is training at AKA, but I really question how much it has helped his striking. We've seen that training at AKA does not automatically make you a polished striker with a prime example being Josh Koscheck. Kos is certainly a better striker than when he began his career, but he's still largely a bomb winging fighter with a lot of openings left by his actions.

Cain's last fight saw him fight a great striker in Cheick Kongo and he had the right game plan. He took Kongo down every chance he got and kept him down while dropping shots on him. When they were standing however, Cheick was able to land good punches on Cain repeatedly and hurt him quite badly on more than one occasion. Cain wasn't always in a stance to shoot on Kongo, he had his hands up in a kickboxing stance and was still tagged quite easily. This still shows Cain has a long way to go in the striking department on both the offensive and defensive sides.

Cain is the beneficiary of a division where great strikers are far from abundant. Heavyweight is a division of grapplers and so Cain will be able to coast without great striking. However there's an old saying that no matter what you do, there's always going to be someone better at it. As great a wrestler as Cain is he's going to need something to complement his wrestling when he faces a guy who can outwrestle him, and he's fighting guys who have won NCAA championships, a feat he didn't accomplish as a collegiate wrestler.

2) Finishing Prowess - This may seem like a strange choice when you realize Cain has knocked out or got the referee to call the fight against five of his six opponents. However he isn't much of a power hitter. Denis Stojnic was able to take everything Cain was throwing at him, and Cain threw everything in his striking arsenal but the kitchen sink and still couldn't hurt Stojnic. The only reason that fight was stopped was because Stojnic wasn't throwing anything back because he was dead tired. Cain just couldn't seem to hurt the guy with anything.

When he was fighting Cheick Kongo, Cain had Kongo on his back so often for so long he probably could have painted an exact replica of the ceiling of Lanxess Arena. I don't think I ever saw Cain work as hard to finish someone as he did against Kongo. Yet for all the right and left hand bombs he landed on a near defenseless Kongo, Cheick made it to the final bell. Cain just couldn't hurt him bad enough to either knock him into a state of unconsciousness or to warrant the referee stepping in to deem that he had taken enough punishment.

Perhaps more alarming that Cain's apparent lack of power in his ground and pound is that he hasn't submitted anyone and against Kongo he didn't even try to. Most wrestlers have found that quite a few submission holds from the catch style of wrestling or BJJ have been easy to adapt to their repertoire. Cain doesn't seem to have picked up on that and its going to give guys chances to survive and mount comebacks against him. If a guy can get you down but can't finish you with strikes nor will he threaten you with potential submissions, he has nothing for you to be afraid of except for being out pointed.

Who Can Beat Him?
This is the least favorite part of an article I've had to write so far. The fact of the matter is I think most quality heavyweights can beat Cain. It hurts to say that because the guy always comes to fight and always does his damndest to give you your money's worth for the entire card, not just his fight. He doesn't have the skillset or physical tools in my opinion to ever be the UFC heavyweight champion, or even in the top three.

The easiest comparison to make with Cain is to compare him to Clay Guida. Guida is a cardio machine, as is Velasquez. They both have strong wrestling backgrounds that have fans calling each man a "blanket", but do it in exciting fashion. They both have a one dimensional game plan and don't threaten anyone with their striking to potentially KO them, nor do they have a submission game that threatens opponents. They're good at what they do but not good enough to hang with the best of the division.

Cain is still young, and you never know where his career could go. I just don't see him ever being more than a gate keeper and the heavyweight equivalent of Clay Guida. If UFC management wants to see if a heavyweight prospect is legit, they'll match him up with Cain. If Cain strings together some quality wins he'll be in talks for a title shot, but he's too small to wrestle with Brock and doesn't hit hard enough to strike with a heavy hitter with a ground game like Carwin. He has no submission game so he could be easy pickings for a Mir or Nogueira.

Where Cain is right now fighting Ben Rothwell as the semi-final of a UFC PPV card seems to me like the highest he can go. He'll beat a guy like Ben, but that's because he's supposed to. He just can't compete with the top heavyweights.