Shogun looks to be in decent shape...

Hopefully he gets it done quick and brutal. Im ashamed to say I see this as a 50/50, FG is more than capable of smothering Rua again imo.

 

I'm praying that Shogun is a step closer to his real self this fight, much like he looked a lot more like his real self against Chuck than he did against Coleman, before he peaked in the Machida fights.

If the guy that fights Forrest is 70% of the real Shogun, he wins this fight by devastation.

 

I hope so. An in shape Shogun is a beautiful thing to watch and its always cool seeing Griffin KTFO. But this better be legit because say what you will about Forrest you gotta be on top on your game because you know he will work his ass off and be 100 percent prepared. Hopefully Shogun finally wises up though I thought after the 1st Griffin and 2nd Coleman fights he had learned but he looked in worse shape vs Bones Jones then he did in either of those fights.

 

He looked worse against Jones than in those fights because Jones kneed him in the mouth in the first ten seconds and he was fighting in a punch drunk haze for the rest of that brutal ass whooping.

 

Griffin really is going to get destroyed in this fight.

 

Yes, he was at peak fitness that night. His physique, energy levels, stamina and explosiveness all proved that. And we've all saw him being irreparably damaged by one knee before.

 

I'll admit it, his body looked a bit soft but he's never been chiseled from stone and looked far softer against Griffin and Coleman than he did Jones. And it wasn't just the knee, though it was brutal and it did severely stagger him, but the next four minutes of ass whooping that made the damage irreparable. In that round he was nearly KOed by a knee, kicked in the face twice and nearly KOed once from that, mauled to the body in the clinch, spinning back elbowed, etc etc. If you don't think that was more significant than him carrying a couple extra pounds, you're crazy and/or have a mancrush on the dude.

The reason you've never seen Shogun behave like that after a blow is because he's never continuously eaten shots like that before.

 

And why do you think the fight was so one-sided? Because Shogun has looked **** coming off long lay-offs before, and looked **** coming off a long lay-off again. A peak fitness/sharpness Shogun would not get dominated like that by any mammal that has ever weighed 205lbs.

 

not even this??

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Shogun is awesome and before Jones the best 205er I've seen to date, but Jones has the potential to be MMA's Ali with his physical gifts and technical excellence. Shogun has struggled with superior wrestlers before and there has never been another superior wrestler with the Thai boxing chops and go-for-broke crazy **** on the feet, the elite level clinch game both Thai and Greco, and the damaging top control that Jones possesses. Submitting Randleman from the bottom is a lot easier than a guy with good positional awareness, submission defense, and a stretch armstrong phsyique that allows him to swing absolute hammers for elbows from guard.

It might have been less one-sided if Shogun was in '05 MWGP form (though that guy was also far less technically sound than today's) but the stylistic match-up doesn't bode well for Shogun, at all.

 

This is such horse****. At his "peak" in the second Machida fight, he was coming off of surgery on his appendix that he'd had two months prior and had a torn ligament in his knee. He and his camp said that he felt much better physically going into the Jones fight.

Shogun fans are turning into an abhorrent combination of B.J. Penn fans and the people who always claimed that "old Vitor" was back whenever Belfort KO'd an opponent quickly.

To be clear, I don't think that Shogun is the same fighter that he was in PRIDE before the his first set of serious injuries. I just think that it's ridiculous to pretend that he's practically crippled every time that he runs into a bad stylistic match up and looks like ****.

 

He got caught by a shot that would have KO'd most other fighters in the first ten seconds, then he was taken down and raped on the cage floor for a good three minutes. He was literally turning purple trying to sweep Jones while being smothered and taking a shitload of elbows to the body. Again, I think that it's a credit to his toughness that he made it out of the first round. Most other fighters would have been done after that barrage of kicks and punches that he ate the face while he was getting up.

Shogun's got a striker's chance against anybody. However, unless his wrestling improves by a hundred fold in the near future, he's always going to be at a severe stylistic disadvantage against Jones.

 

Very true that Jones was just bad news for Shogun regardless of his condition. However, the fights with Coleman and Forrest weren't a result of that. Coleman's only tool throughout his career was wrestling and when he rematched Shogun his wrestling and condition were shadows of what they once were. Shogun's takedown defense is pretty abysmal but not that bad because he was falling over like a blind drunk at last call every time Coleman would pick his ankle so I would say that was a clear case of **** conditioning and rust.

And Forrest isn't even a good wrestler. He's got a basic trip from the clinch and can't even shoot a decent double or single and before Shogun gassed out like a lung cancer patient he was doing alright in the clinch with him and scoring his own takedowns. He was just even more sluggish than slow ass Griffin and that isn't common.

The reason I don't apply the same sort of reasoning to what Jones did is because we didn't have time to see Shogun's speed or explosiveness before he was flying kneed in the face and nearly wiped out. That was literally ten seconds into the bout and after the knee landed there was rarely a second that passed in the first round that Shogun wasn't being bombarded with heavy artillery so how the **** could conditioning and speed have mattered when he didn't even have time to get offensive before being put on ***** street?

 

What do you know, MentalMandribble can actually make useful posts.

Shogun was at 100% going into the Jones fight. Even his camp has said the the knee and some heavy shots in the first round were what took it out of Shogun. I don't think there's any current version of Shogun that would've made it the full 5 rounds against the Jon Jones that showed up at 128.