Title Writing: I Coulda Been A Contender 5 "Chad Mendes"

Hello,

This is the fifth article in a weekly series meant to track and profile the top contenders to the title in each of the UFC's seven weight classes. Last week I profiled Alistair Overeem, who was kind enough to justify my choice by defeating Brock Lesnar in title eliminator. He is now set to face champion Junior Dos Santos. I'm hopeful that the fight will be paired with Sonnen/Silva II, should that fight indeed come to fruition this summer. MMA Mania had a story up yesterday quoting Dana White as looking to put Sonnen/Silva II into a soccer stadium. He might want to save Overeem and Dos Santos for another card but pairing those two fights together in front of 75,000 plus Brazilians would top UFC 129 on both the size of the show and the magnitude of the fights on it. I'm sure that there will be lots to discuss on that front later though, as for now there are more pressing issues at hand as another Brazilian champion, Jose Aldo, is set to defend his title in front of his people in less than 10 days time at UFC 142. Today I will profile his opponent, Alpha Male stand out Chad Mendes.

California Demon

Mixed martial arts is a highly diverse sport, with fighters hailing from all corners of the world, coming from all kinds of upbringings and using many different fighting styles. There have been champions who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, facing adversity at all stages of their lives and there have been champions who grew up, silver spoon in hand, never having to worry about their future. Thus it is difficult to pin point one specific recipe for success. If you had to try though, it's unlikely that you'd come up with something that didn't include the sport of wrestling.

Of all the big gyms in the mixed martial arts world, few have as many top wrestlers as California based Team Alpha Male. Best known as the home of former WEC superstar Urijah Faber, the camp has become somewhat of a small man's Team Quest, the place where Randy Couture and Dan Henderson cut their teeth together during the birth of modern MMA. It's no real surprise that wrestlers often seek out other wrestlers to train with. Wrestling is built on the notion of pitting your strength against your opponents, engaging them in a battle of attrition, wearing them down until they lose the desire to fight. It's a distinctly different approach from that of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which seeks to use beautiful technique to overcome power and strength. This approach leads BJJ players who enter MMA to seek out the best techniques from a variety of sources, while wrestlers tend to stick together, work to implement a few skills from other disciplines but never stray very far from their roots. This is not to say that wrestlers don't possess a great deal of technical skills but the manor in which they hone these skills is markedly different. Wrestlers drill endlessly and love the battle against each other in the "room", as they call it. The more wrestlers around, the happier they are and the better they become.

This is what Alpha Male has done and this is exactly how Mendes has navigated through his three year, 11 fight MMA career unscatched. He is by no means a one-dimensional fighter but he knows what he is good at and he uses it to his advantage. After a successful college career wrestling at Cal Poly, where he was the Pac Ten wrestler of the year and runner up at the 2008 NCAA championships in his senior year, Mendes immediately began training with Faber and company, taking his first fight in August of that year. Fighting for Palace Fighting Championships, a short lived but fairly competitive California regional promotion that put on fights from 2007-2009, Mendes would go 4-0, including a 44 second knockout of recent TUF competitor Steven Siler. It's probably his most impressive showing, certainly in terms of the outcome, as Mendes has had difficulty finishing his opponents as he has moved up the rankings. Moving from Palace Fighting Championships to the WEC, he would again put together a 4-0 record before making his UFC debut against Michihiro Omigawa at UFC 126.

A Wrestlers Mentality

Following a decision victory over Omigawa in which Mendes showed an improved (but still basic) striking game to go with his dominant positional grappling, Dana White tabbed Mendes as the next title contender, awaiting the results of Jose Aldo vs Mark Hominick.

Unfortunately for Mendes, Aldo did not make it through the fight unscathed and rather then wait for Aldo to heal, Mendes took a fight with Rani Yahya at UFC 133. By now we have learned enough from Rashad Evans to know that you should just fight when you can but, at the time, Anthony Pettis had just lost his "guaranteed" title shot when he took and lost a fight to Clay Guida at the Ultimate Fighter finale. Mendes has a fighter's spirit though; he wasn't interested in waiting 9 months for a fight that hadn't been signed yet. He took a calculated risk in taking a sure fight against a respected black belt. It did pay off, as he dominated Yahya on the feet and in the grappling department en route to a three round decision victory. Aldo fought and beat Kenny Florian in October and soon after Mendes was installed as the next challenger.

At first glance the fight is pretty much a classic striker vs grappler match. Aldo is the mesmerizing knockout artist. He is fast and powerful and will inflict damage from your feet all the way up your body to your head. He uses leg kicks more frequently then any other UFC champion.

Mendes is the wrestling stand out, who uses take downs and top control to grind you down. He has never really been threatened in his career, clearly winning most of his fights. In the article above, a nice read written by Tim Burke of Bloody Elbow, Mendes says that he doesn't think Aldo has good ground conditioning and if he can get him down he'll be able to wear him out.

The only problem is we've never seen that strategy work against Aldo, who is quite simply the best fighter in the world at keeping the fight standing. Fight Metric lists Andrei Arlovski as having the best defense ever, stopping 89% of take downs against him. Aldo, however, clocks in at an astonishing 94%. Not only that, but he has stopped a legit amount, 45 of 48 in the 10 WEC/UFC fights that were tracked. He doesn't qualify on a technicality, namely that he doesn't have the minimum 5 UFC fights. Make no mistake though, his ability to keep the fight standing has been tested often in the fights he hasn't won quickly. His speed and power are seamlessly combined with that technical prowess of a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt. If he wants to keep the fight on the feet he's almost certainly going to.

Mendes is going to have to come prepared for a stand up fight at least in the early rounds and I'm not sure he's had enough experience to realize that this is the most likely possibility. If he has focused his entire camp on getting the takedown and what comes after it, it could very well be a short night for him. If he is ready to fight three rounds on the feet and then go after a worn out Aldo, then he could set about pitting his strength against Aldo's technique and harvest the fruits of all those hours spent grinding in the wrestling room. If the fight gets to the championship rounds I think Mendes will steal a decision.

Should be an interesting fight. Thanks for reading.

*Jon Jones also doesn't qualify; he would actually be higher than Aldo but the other criteria is at least 20 attempts and Jones has been so dominant that there have only been 11attempts to take him down, none successful, in his 10 fight UFC career.