Unfair to say MMA fighters can't strike or box

I've been lurking on these forums for a while now but finally decided to post to try and correct some of the constant misconceptions about boxing or striking in general in MMA.

A lot of the posts here state that MMA fighters would get killed in a boxing ring or they are simply lower class athletes who couldn't make it into boxing. This simply isn't true and is a massive misconception. I'll start by making a general overview followed by a technical breakdown.
I've trained both sports for a while now but MMA a lot more. In fact, to be truthful I started out as a grappler in my teenage years learning Judo before realizing my submission game and by bottom game was relatively weak therefore focused more on BJJ. Only when I reached adulthood did I begin to learn MMA striking and boxing.

To sum up, you can't box in MMA. It's not tactically or technically possible to box in an MMA fight in the purest sense. There are so many techniques, in fact I would say most of them, that simply do not work in MMA. I've seen this and experienced this first hand. Vice versa, if you employed MMA striking into boxing you'd be slaughtered. Different rule-sets mean that the hands are used differently.

First of all, stance. Alot of the boxers focus their stance very angled. We'll focus on Floyd Mayweather's shoulder roll angle stance. That simply is a recipe for disaster in MMA. Why? Because you'd find it incredibly difficult to sprawl as soon as the blast double comes. You can try this at home in your living room. Stand relatively square and then sprawl your hips to the floor. Now stand with one leg way in front of the other at an angle, now try and sprawl your hips to the floor. Standing that angled is just asking to be blast doubled.

Another point with stance is that standing sideways angled is just asking for the front leg to be kicked away. It's why the game play for the Diaz brothers is to leg kick the **** out of them and it works more often than not. You can only get away with this in MMA if you're a southpaw fighting an orthodox. Look at McGregor's stance for example. His stance is ridiculously wide and leads heavy on the front foot. Why does this work for him in MMA? Because he is a southpaw, when he's fighting an orthodox fighter, the orthodox fighter can't smash Mcgregor's lead leg with their power leg. He can only do inside leg kicks which are far less damaging than outside ones. If he tries to beat on his back leg, he's essentially trading a legkick for Mcgregor's left cross. Not something you really want to play with.

We all know for a fact that McGregor has pretty average defensive Wrestling. Look how Chad Mendes repeatedly took down McGregor with blast doubles. It's due to his angled wide stance.

You have a lot of boxers with a square stance too and they'd far a little better. Here is the thing with an MMA stance, it's angled slightly but its more sagged in order to prepare for the shoot or sprawl. You don't really see it in boxers and it's very obvious in sparring who comes from an MMA background.

Second point; head movement. Head movement is far less useless in MMA than it is in boxing. Don't get me wrong, headmovement is still incredibly important. But in boxing you see fighters get their head almost down to waist level and then clinch up or counter when they get back up. Can't do that in MMA. Two reasons. First of all, and i'm speaking from experience, if i threw a left or a right hook and then the dude in front of me started hanging his head waist high, rather than fling an uppercut at him, i'd literally just catch him with a thai plumb and then knee his face apart. It's not ideal. The second reason why head movement that low is a bad idea is submissions.

If any of you want to see a case study, watch the last Tony Ferguson fight and how it finished. Tony fergurson was launching combo's and the dude had his head real low to dodge them. Ferguson put him in a guillotine instantly and then finished it off by switching to a D'arc choke. Headmovement in MMA is important but it has to be subtle, or you have a ridiculous chin and you are not afraid to just eat headkicks/knee's. Watch the Cruz-Dilashaw fight for that haha, Cruz literally headbutted away Dillashaw's headkicks. Any profound head movement in MMA that results in your head being really low for a prolonged period of time is very dangerous.

The third technical point is that very rarely you see punching combo's in MMA because there are so many gaps for countering. The only top volumn punchers you really see are Cain Velasquez, Carlos Condit and TJ Dilashaw. That's mainly aswell because everyone is afraid of Cain's wrestling, Condit doesn't care about getting hit and TJ is too fast for his division.

See the straight left coming? Legkick. See the right hook coming? Duck, bodyshot, clinch or takedown. There's so many gaps opening when you throw long winded combinations that there's just too much of a chance of you getting hit and hurt from a counter. The best fighters in MMA are not really combination fighters. Jon Jones, GSP, Anderson Silva never relied on their heavy combinations but solid 1 or 2 shot counters or single shots that would grind away at their opponent. GSP would literally win fights by jabbing his opponent at bay for 5 rounds.

The final point is movement. Movement is completely different in MMA aswell. Circling like you do in boxing can result you walking into a roundhouse bodykick or a headkick. Cage work is so important in MMA which is why the clinch is one of the first things they ever teach you.

My point is basically to say it's unfair to say these guys can't strike because their methods won't work in boxing. Just like it would be unfair to say boxers can't strike because their methods won't work in MMA. Having trained in both and understood the huge difference in them, I hope I've provided some technical ****ysis of why the two sports are not really interchangable.

 

Haha, in fairness mate, I'm European and I can understand where you're coming from.

We have excellent BJJ gyms here but literally wrestling itself is so niche you don't have a single actual pure wrestling gym. From a pure MMA standpoint, I thought I was an alright wrestler.

Then I went to train with ATT in USA for 3 weeks and was getting ragdolled about by guys who have wrestled since the age of 12.

 

Both of the Emelianenko brothers had excellent hands because they weren't scared of getting taken down, so they could just swing for the fences really.

I mean, who's dumb enough to try and enter Fedor's guard? He had some of the most savage and quick armbars from his guard ever. His opponents always had the wrestling in the back of their minds meaning they can't fully commit to striking.

You put them in a boxing ring and suddenly the threat of the ground game is taken away and both fighters don't have to worry about grappling, the mindset of the opponent is completely different. He can counter and launch his own combo's without being worried about taken to the ground.

 

It's like that with a lot of fighters.

Look at Overeem. From knocking out Badr Hari in a straight K1 match to getting knocked out by the likes of bigfoot Silva.