Going into this Saturday’s UFC 185, like many people, I really wondered about the Co-Main event bout between Carla Esparza and Joanna Jedrzejczyk, the second title fight in the history of the UFC’s Strawweight Division.
Carla Esparza was coming of a series of dominant performances on the most recent season of The Ultimate Fighter, where she handily defeated all her opponents, including Rose Namajunas, to become the first champion in the history of the UFC’s Strawweight Division. Carla Esparza’s wrestling has proven to be virtually peerless in her weight division, both before and during this past season of TUF. Nobody in recent years has had much of an answer for her wrestling prowess, and I went into watching the fight this past Saturday unsure of how the fight would play out any differently than her fights over the past four years.
Usually, when people bill a fight as “…this is a classic Grappler vs. Striker matchup”, the fighter with the grappling base ends up winning the fight in dominant fashion. Sometimes the fighter with a striking background will clip them on the feet or upon entry into a takedown…but such don’t happen very often. I will admit that while I have a personal preference towards striking based martial arts, I will not attempt to deny the dominance that grapplers have had in MMA since the onset of the sport.
Jedrzejczyk, a veteran of over 60 Muay Thai fights, as well as being a winner of six championships in that discipline, has one of the better standup pedigrees of any woman in the sport. Her striking efforts in her first two fights in the UFC were nothing short of superb. While the general consensus was that Joanna Jedrzejczyk was stealing the pre-fight media buildup, I continued to see a lot of people predicting a lopsided grappling/submission based win for Esparza. Admittedly, so did I.
Man, was I wrong.
Joanna Jedrzejczyk not only brutalized Esparza on the feet, but also stifled the majority of Esparza’s takedown attempts. Whenever a matchup like this takes place, fans and members of the media alike will immediately say something to the tune of “..well hopefully he/she has been working on her takedown defense!”. It was apparently obvious that not only was Jedrzejczyk working on her takedown defense, she utilized it to greater effect than virtually any of Esparza’s past opponents.
While Jedrzejczyk didn’t use much in the way of kicks and knees, likely to help avoid getting taken down, she absolutely lit up Esparza with countless combinations that were unerringly accurate. And when Esparza would shoot for takedowns to avoid further punishment, Jedrzejczyk almost always met such attempts with deftly executed sprawls and get subsequent scrambles that saw her able to quickly resume her striking efforts.
The end result was a 2nd round TKO victory, with Jedrzejczyk unleashing a blistering five-punch combination upon Esparza, who was backed up close to the cage wall. Upon the referee waving off the fight, Esparza slumped to the ground, leaving little doubt as to the merit of the stoppage.
With the victory, Joanna Jedrzejczyk becomes just the second UFC Strawweight Champion, as well as the first champion of Polish decent in promotional history. With the UFC continually making further inroads into the European and Asian markets, I am certain that the promotion possessing a new European champion certainly can’t hurt their prospects in the region. While the upcoming UFC Fight Night: Krakow card is obviously too soon for Jedrzejczyk to fight on, I’m certain that the UFC would have her fight in a Main Event or Co-Main Event in the future when the UFC returns to Poland.
With her blend of vicious striking and awesome takedown defense, Joanna Jedrzejczyk poses a serious threat to any potential challengers to her belt. If Carla Esparza, the best wrestler in the division by far, couldn’t get much in the way of takedowns, it will likely be quite challenging for other Strawweight fighters to achieve success in that arena.
Personally, I’ll go with a pair of outside choices for Jedrzejczyk’s next opponent.
Joanne Calderwood possesses a phenomenal striking arsenal, effortlessly blending kicks, punches, knees and elbows into devastating combinations. A fight between her and Jedrzejczyk could be fireworks, assuming Calderwood comes out of her upcoming UFC Fight Night: Krakow bout against Maryna Moroz victorious.
Felice Herrig, who possesses some great striking of her own, could also be a great matchup, if she gets by Paige VanZant on April 18 on UFC Fight Night: Machida vs. Rockhold in Newark New Jersey. Herrig is also a very accomplished striker, holding a professional kickboxing record of 23-5, including winning championships and being the number 2 ranked bantamweight by the International Kickboxing Federation. She is one of the few Straweights out there whose experience in other striking based combat sports comes close to that of Jedrzejczyk. A match between the two could very well be a thrilling striking affair, one that would also, in my opinion, drive Pay Per View sales for a variety of reasons…which is also a good thing for the UFC, as they are forever seeking to create female PPV draws in addition to Ronda Rousey.
Having said that, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Jedrzejczyk looks to be an incredibly tall order for anyone she might come against. Even the two aforementioned fighters would have to weather a lot of strikes, accurate ones at that, to be able to enact their respective gameplans and find a way to do what no woman has managed to do before, which is beat Joanna Jedrzejczyk. Claudia Gadelha may have come close, in what was a debated Split Decision, but Jedrzejczyk seems poised to continue to take the MMA world by storm between her awesome interviews and in-cage performances. If she is able to continue to replicate even a decent semblance of last weekend’s performance, I think that she will dominate the UFC Strawweight Division for some time.
And I look forward to watching it!