Laura Sanko agrees with the two judges who scored UFC 297’s main event for Dricus du Plessis over Sean Strickland following a razor close five-round battle in Toronto.
“I did have Dricus, both when I watched it live and when I went back and re-watched it,” the UFC analyst and color commentator told MMA Fighting. “I had Dricus winning by the narrowest of margins, the smallest of margins.”
Du Plessis captured the UFC middleweight title with the win, ending Strickland’s title reign after just 132 days.
While Strickland did out-land du Plessis in total and significant strikes, Sanko said those stats don’t always tell the story. She explained why the new champion — in her eyes — was able to squeak it out in the middle rounds.
“That’s what people need to keep in mind is that there is an inherent bias to bigger punches in the scoring criteria,” Sanko said. “Whenever I’m judging a fight — and this is kind of how I was taught to judge a fight and makes a lot of sense to me — it’s almost like you have … I imagine a volume knob, or a power meter, and to one side is one fighter and the other side is the other fighter, and a fighter a lands a really big shot that, that knob goes pretty far over, and if the other fighter lands a few, it might click back a little bit toward the middle, but you may never even get back to zero.
“In other words, it takes a good amount of accumulative damage to compensate for a strong amount of immediate damage. Immediate is always more important than cumulative, and we talk about this all the time. But when they throw up the stats, significant strikes, it throws everybody off because I’ll say it time and time again, they are not actually significant in the way that we think of the word significant. It’s just a word that they attach to it because every single distant strike is considered significant.
“So even if you hit the lightest jab, if it’s a distance, it is a significant strike, so when you see someone leading significantly in strikes, which actually, I don’t think there was ever an insane margin where Sean was … he did out-strike him, but it was never wildly different, those numbers, but people want to grab onto that and say, ‘See, he won because he hit him more,’ and that’s just not how it works. But I can understand why it is incredibly confusing and why people think that.”
There were a lot of questions about how du Plessis would be able to handle the championship rounds if the fight got extended, especially facing a guy like Strickland who has proven himself in that department many times over the last few years. As the fight progressed, du Plessis showed that he could still perform at a high level, even having his best round of the fight in Round 4.
Sanko had the same thoughts heading into the bout, and was impressed with how the newly crowned 185-pound champion was able to dig deep.
“I would have been one of those people that would have favored Sean Strickland in a longer fight,” Sanko explained. “I was really impressed to see Dricus du Plessis go out there and showcase what an incredible gas tank he really does have, and an ability to have a tank in the later rounds and make it over a longer fight because the evidence was there that he had struggled with that in the past. The evidence was there that he didn’t have much or any experience going to the fourth or fifth round, certainly not at a championship context, so I think that was a fair assessment.
“But he certainly proved people like myself to be wrong. So I was excited to see that because that just makes him an even more complete fighter — right? — to be able to speak of in the future, and those are the more interesting matchups to me at the championship level.”
Strickland may have officially lost the fight and the middleweight title, but it doesn’t seem like he lost much else — in fact, there’s a case to be made that with how he is perceived in the court of public opinion, that he came out slightly better than du Plessis.
The now former champion proved he belonged at the top of the division with his UFC 297 performance, along with his championship winning outing against Israel Adesanya at UFC 293 in September. As far as breaking down the performance as a whole, and how it reflects on the scoring, Sanko agreed with a sentiment that Strickland’s head coach Eric Nicksick had after one of the closely contested rounds.
“I think his defense is such a linchpin of his game,” Sanko said of Strickland. “But there are times where it almost becomes a detriment to his ability to really put his foot on the gas, kind of like in the [Jared] Cannonier fight, and I talked about this with Din Thomas — so I’m blatantly stealing this from Din — what he said was Sean Strickland reminds [him] of a Jorge Masvidal. Like a guy who just likes to fight, and he knows in those moments he’s getting the better of the guy because he’s landing his jab or whatever, like he’s getting the better of him, and he doesn’t really give a lot of credence to scoring criteria and all of this stuff that wouldn’t really affect a real fight.
“There is something when you watch Sean fight where you’re just like, ‘I just want 10 percent more’. It was like Eric said, I think it was after the fourth round, or maybe it was the third, but when Eric came to Sean in the corner and said, ‘I didn’t like that round at all.’ That was exactly how I felt watching the round too because he’s capable of stepping on the gas.
“But on the flip side, Dricus did do a phenomenal job of making it really difficult for Sean to do that, because Sean fights best off the front foot and Dricus did just enough to consistently knock back [Strickland] in these small increments, and then of course he would come forward. It wasn’t a nonstop thing, but it was enough to where Sean was not fighting in his rhythm and in his comfort zone the way that we saw him do against Izzy, and it was just enough to barely get the win.”