Willroast's blog

A Different Look at Couture

Submitted by Willroast on November 15, 2008 - 11:36am.

I'll start by saying that I am not trying to bash Couture. I've just been seeing a lot of hype with Randy in the last year and wanted to try to put some of it in perspective. I think that Randy has been very impressive for his age and shows a great fighting intellect, but he has still lost 1 in every 3 fights with his record standing at 16-8. A closer look at those losses:

Enson Inoue ('98), Mikhail Illoukhine ('99), and Valentine Overeem ('00). All three guys beat Couture by submission. These three losses were early in Couture's MMA career and actually show that Couture learned to adjust in more recent years as they are the only fights he has lost by submission (other than 1 sub by strikes that could just as easily have been called a TKO) . There is no denying his ability to avoid the subs at this point in his career and Lesner is very unlikely to be working subs on him anyway.

Couture's other losses are what I find to be more telling.

Josh Barnett ('02). Barnett was a bigger guy with good striking and very strong wrestling backround and used both to get the TKO victory. Barnett was later stripped for using the juice, but that doesn't change the fact that Couture found it hard to survive the striking of a bigger guy.

Ricco Rodriguez ('02). Again, a bigger guy took it to Couture, this time by submission due to strikes in the 5th. Couture was the clear point leader heading into the final round but Rodriguez eventually used his size advantage to end the fight. Size and strikes are the trend.

Vitor Belfort ('04). This fight was a wash as Belfort got the win due to a cut caused by a possibly defective glove cutting Randy's eye and Randy avenged the loss soon thereafter (making him 2-1 against Belfort).

Chuck Liddell 2x ('05 and '06). While size wasn't as big of an issue in these fights, Chuck's strength in striking and great sprawl was very clear as he KO'ed Couture both times. This pushed Couture into retirement until he noticed the serious lack of depth in the HW division (he had been fighting at LHW for a while). Again strength and striking was the way to beat Randy.

Since those losses to Liddell, Couture has had 2 wins over much bigger opponents who have both been having issues with conditioning or lack of drive in Gabriel Gonzaga and Tim Sylvia (not in that order). Neither of these two HW's were preforming at their potential and both combined to help make Couture earn the label as a "master strategist" that folks have been fawning over for the last year. I think he is a great strategist in that he has changed weight classes to expose weaknesses in the divisions at the time, but I think his game-planning is very similar to the game-planning that any strong MMA gym would use for these fights.

As it pertains to Lesnar, I think that both will have strong game-planning for this fight. Couture needs to obviously find a way to nullify Lesnar's huge size, strength, and speed (relative to size) advantages and Lesnar needs to be cautious and not give in to his apparently over-zealous nature. I don't think it takes a brilliant strategist to know this and train accordingly.

Couture has lost several times to guys that have the same advantages over him that Lesnar does and Randy doesn't have nearly the submission arsenal that Frank Mir does, so this fight appears to be Lesnar's to lose. Could Couture pull it off? Sure, but he has had trouble with fights like this in the past and he is going to have to look past his last 2 wins to find a way to pull this off because Lesnar seems to be way more hungry than Sylvia has been since the Arlovski fights and way more grounded than Gonzaga was after his Cro-Cop fight. This fight could end in many different ways, but I think the most likely one will be the same way as Couture's other losses -- strikes and strength should get Lesnar the TKO.

And either way, Fedor has nothing to worry about from Couture.