Dug into a little back of what we had talked about in the past with both Adesanya & Strickland to try to figure things out.
My first takeaway is that a fight that could have been a tell in terms of what Strickland could do here was his fight v Uriah Hall. He won that 25 minute fight against a weaker version of Adesanya using fairly rudimentary boxing and relying on his jab. He kept Hall on his back foot for much of the fight and he couldn't get anything going. Left jab, right hook. Pretty basic stuff and I haven't re-watched the entire fight, but some of the same stuff he did here.
Then lets go to why Strickland isn't ranked high and was such an underdog here. I think there's a chance it's more circumstance & optics than anything else. He's now 9-2 at 185lbs with his losses being to Pereira and Cannonier. The Cannonier fight was a true split decision that could have gone either way. So basically his two losses are a fight he might not even have lost and a KO to a guy in Pereira that has shown he can probably KO anyone. This is where the bad optics come in - he got embarrassed in his biggest fight and "lost" a boring fight with Cannonier for his second biggest fight. It's not that he's lost to the other top guys in the division.. he just hasn't fought many of them.
The only time we really talked much about Strickland here was last year after Adesanya/Whittaker II:
I do wonder what an elite wrestler could do vs Adesanya.. but there isn't that guy at 185lb right now. Maybe Chimaev eventually, but who knows. Well a guy like Weidman has wanted to get his opportunity but his chin is gone and his leg is taking so long to recover he'll never be in that...
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Highlighting this one because we were trying to figure out future contenders for Adesanya and it's interesting that I don't even think Pereira was brought up yet (unless I missed it) and almost nobody gave Strickland a thought.
I'm not highlighting this post from that thread in 2022 because it was me who said it (okay, maybe a little) because I thought Strickland had no chance here earlier this week. I'm trying to figure out why I thought Strickland had a chance in early 2022 and then no chance in September 2023. In that time both Adesanya & Strickland got KO'd by Pereira. Strickland won two other fights and had the Cannonier split loss. Adesanya beat Pereira in the rematch and beat Cannonier himself in an awful fight. Like, was much of this not giving Strickland a chance because he was on the wrong side of a split decision? He looked fine/good in every fight he's had other than the Pereira one.