Niceto have your violence back, Mr. Silva. We missed it last year. |Photo: Sherdog.com
2011 All-Violence First Team• Heavyweight:Junior dosSantos• Light Heavyweight:JonJones• Middleweight:AndersonSilva• Welterweight:NickDiaz• Lightweight:NateDiaz• Featherweight:Chan SungJung• Bantamweight:UrijahFaber• Flyweight:IanMcCallHeavyweight: In most years, if you’re the most successfulheavyweight in MMA, you’ll get on this list. If you win the UFCtitle, your chances are stronger still. But, if you knock out
CainVelasquez -- 2010’s All-Violence first team heavyweight rep --in 64 seconds on primetime network TV with pinpoint punchingstanding and on the ground, you’re a lock. And that is to saynothing of dos Santos’ one-sided shellacking of
ShaneCarwin, either. According to
FightMetric.com, dos Santos landedmore strikes (116) than his two combined opponents threw (102). Athird-teamer in 2010, it’s hard to imagine dos Santos not puttingan all-V streak together for himself.
Light Heavyweight: Who else was going to be here? With awide variety of tools,
Jon Jonesthrashed his 2011 opposition with startling ease, and as such,repeats as a first-team All-Violence entry. His schedule includedthree previous UFC champions, but it didn’t matter, as Jonesbuzzsawed everything in sight en route to a 2011 campaign thatre-defined single-year success in MMA. Though Jones’ trio ofsubmissions were set up with his unique blend of offensive tools,his sustained, whole-body beatdown of
Mauricio“Shogun” Rua to take the title in March would’ve been enough toget Jones the top spot by itself. In a year full of sensationalviolence, Jones’ title capture was one of the year’s most grisly,hard-to-watch moments, and somehow, it was wholly fitting.
Middleweight: One never knows what they’re going to get with
AndersonSilva in any given fight, let alone an entire year. In 2011, inbetween Nike sponsorships and Burger King ads, Silva managed tofront kick the face off of
VitorBelfort before styling all over
Yushin Okamiin front of a partisan Rio crowd. After dropping Okami twice, Silvanow holds the record for most knockdowns in UFC history at 15,usurping
ChuckLiddell’s 14. Flying front kicks to the face were all the ragein 2011, and Silva lit that fuse with his knockout over Belfort,which Brazilian fight fans immediately immortalized as “
bicudana fuca” -- Portuguese slang loosely meaning “boot to the dog’ssnout.” After all, when it comes to Silva, common words and phrasesjust can’t conjure the magic.
Welterweight: No need to recite a hit list for
Nick Diaz in2011; we all watched and rocked to this man’s V. So, let’s go tothe boffins: according to the number crunching gurus atFightMetric, Diaz topped 2011’s list of Strikes Landed per Minute(SLpM) among fighters with at least three fights in UFC,Strikeforce, and Dream. How dominant was he? Second-place
MelvinGuillard clocked in at 6.22 SLpM. Diaz? 10.95. He set theall-time record for significant strikes landed in a single fight byFightMetric, with 178 against
B.J. Penn, arecord his younger brother would later break -- more on that later.He’s the only man to ever put up two 100-plus significant strikeperformances in the same year. He also ties All-V legend
Chris Lytlewith four 100-plus significant strike performances. No one else hasmore than two.
Lightweight: What started with a one-sided loss to
RoryMacDonald at 170 pounds in April ended with two capital-Vperformances. In destroying
TakanoriGomi and
DonaldCerrone, the younger of the esteemed Diaz brothers had the crewat FightMetric tweaking. Against Cerrone,
Nate Diazshattered the record for most significant strikes landed in asingle fight with 238, wiping out older brother Nick’s mark of 178from his victory over
B.J. Penn inOctober. FightMetric tabbed Diaz as landing 65.8 percent of hissignificant strikes against Cerrone, nearly doubling the expectedaccuracy of a fight with 200-plus significant strikes. Diaz landed300 significant strikes, the most in any calendar year in UFChistory. For violence in 2011, 209 was the only number you reallyneeded to know.
Featherweight: In 2011,
Chan SungJung turned in the first twister submission in UFC history over
LeonardGarcia and followed up with a seven-second knockout of
MarkHominick that may or may not have tied a UFC record --applicable apologies to
Duane Ludwig.Jung’s “Korean Zombie” persona embodies much of the spirit thatthis list celebrates, and this year, the cult favoritefeatherweight did it with the highest degree of style, whetherstriking or submitting. That, in a nutshell, is the violence yinand yang.
Bantamweight: Watching a relatively ho-hum March effortagainst previous All-V first-teamer
EddieWineland, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out how
Urijah Fabercould end up on his list. But, with a thrilling, give-and-take25-minute bout with
DominickCruz -- one in which he actually did work with his hands --Faber got back on the right track. In November, he put it in fifthgear against fellow former WEC champion
BrianBowles, who he positively savaged standing, in the scramble andon the ground in one of the year’s most consummate, completeasskickings.
Flyweight: Sherdog.com’s “Comeback Fighter of the Year,”
IanMcCall deserved mention for “Breakthrough Fighter of the Year,”as well. That’s all part of the enormous striking and grapplingimprovements he’s shown under Colin Oyama and
GivaSantana. In February, he overcame a tough first round againstpreviously unbeaten
Jussier daSilva to outslug him, before putting on a 15-minute virtuosobeatdown of another previously unbeaten fighter,
DustinOrtiz. “Uncle Creepy” capped the year by outdueling
DarrellMontague and tapping him out in masterful fashion for the TachiPalace Fights flyweight title. This is what 125-pound action issupposed to look like, and it came against three opponents likelyto follow McCall to the UFC. That’s why he’s getting a chance to bea UFC champion, creeps.
Continue Reading »Page Three: Second Team
