Athletes
Coach Conversation | Dricus Du Plessis vs Sean Strickland 2
TUF Alum, UFC Vet, And MMA Coach Eliot Marshall Shares His Views On Saturday’s Middleweight Main Event
Championship fights are layered battles, with the competitors stepping into the Octagon operating at the highest level in their respective weight classes. Breaking down how these pivotal contests could possibly play out is a challenging venture, which is why UFC staff writer E. Spencer Kyte has taken to enlisting the help of some of the sharpest minds in the sport to help dissect these critical contests.
Ahead of this weekend’s middleweight championship rematch between Dricus Du Plessis and Sean Strickland, Kyte sat down with TUF alum and UFC veteran Eliot Marshall, who now serves as the co-owner and head instructor at Easton Training Center in Denver, to discuss four key points of interest that could help define how the fight plays out.
Best Trait of Each Fighter
Kyte: We’ve got this middleweight championship rematch in front of us, so let’s dive in. What’s the best trait of Dricus Du Plessis? And what’s the best trait of Sean Strickland?
Marshall: The best trait of DDP is that it seems like he’s just a dog, you know? I think that’s his best trait, to be honest with you.
I feel like he out-dogged Sean in the first fight and then he definitely out-dogged (Israel Adesanya) in their fight.
Kyte: And just to be clear — when you say his best trait is that he’s a dog, you’re talking about that ability to navigate whatever is happening and still come forward, press forward, be the guy that is primarily winning the exchanges and the fight overall?
Full Fight | Dricus Du Plessis vs Sean Strickland 1
Unlock MORE of your inner combat sports fan with UFC Fight Pass! Fighting is what we live for. And no one brings you MORE live fights, new shows, and events across multiple combat sports from around the world. With a never-ending supply of fighting in every discipline, there`s always something new to watch. Leave it to the world`s authority in MMA to bring you the Ultimate 24/7 platform for MORE combat sports, UFC Fight Pass!
Full Fight | Dricus Du Plessis vs Sean Strickland 1
/
Marshall: And to go harder when it’s in that weird moment of “who’s gonna go hard right now?”
That’s a thing. If I wanna run, and you wanna sprint, I have a problem, and he has that ability just to be one gear, maybe even only half-a-gear, ahead, which is a problem.
Kyte: So I’m gonna steal an Eric Nicksick term, because while I agree with the dog part, I think his best trait is that he’s a booger, and I think the dog part is in there.
There is no real “this is how I’m gonna game plan for this guy” because he’s just kind of this awkward, lumbering, messy kind of dude that always finds a way to get it done.
How To Watch UFC 312 In Your Country
Marshall: But you watch him fight and you’re like, “This dude is not that good,” but he’s good!
Kyte: Eric and them always call them “boogers” and I can’t get it out of my head when I watch him fight, because, as you said, you see so many people in the division, so many people in other divisions saying, “I could take this dude,” but then you get in there and it’s a whole different story.
It’s kind of what Strickland was first, right?
Marshall: That’s the X-factor, and I know you’re gonna ask me this down the road, but for me, when a bully meets a bigger bully…
And that’s what I think we’ve got going on in this fight a little bit. In the first fight, he just took Strickland’s M.O. and did it to him.
Kyte: Right! It was “Oh, you do weird and awkward and hard to deal with? Watch this!”
Marshall: And I’m a bigger bully than you are. I’m more of a dog than you, and I think that’s gonna be the X-factor.
UFC 312 FREE FIGHTS: Du Plessis vs Strickland 1 | Zhang vs Yan | Strickland vs Costa | Du Plessis vs Adesanya | Suarez vs Andrade
Kyte: All right, so what’s Strickland’s best trait?
Marshall: Sean’s best trait is his strikes up the middle, in my opinion; his jabs, his teeps, when he brings his knee up and walks you down.
Sean Strickland Sit-Down Interview | UFC 312
Unlock MORE of your inner combat sports fan with UFC Fight Pass! Fighting is what we live for. And no one brings you MORE live fights, new shows, and events across multiple combat sports from around the world. With a never-ending supply of fighting in every discipline, there`s always something new to watch. Leave it to the world`s authority in MMA to bring you the Ultimate 24/7 platform for MORE combat sports, UFC Fight Pass!
Sean Strickland Sit-Down Interview | UFC 312
/
That’s his best trait, along with the fact that he's a f***ing bully! They both have this very similar best trait in that, so we’ll find out who the bigger one is a little bit.
Kyte: I’d love to get your thoughts on this because I think Sean’s general disposition is a huge factor for him, because he’s not a dude that is bothered by any of this, that is wrapped up in any of this in terms of this being anything more than how he gets paid.
This is the one thing he can do to make money, be himself, and it allows him to focus and be himself.
Marshall: I agree with you.
FOLLOW @UFCNEWS: On Facebook | On Instagram | On X
Kyte: We talk about it all the time and you see it all the time — how people change when they climb the ladder and get into these bigger fights, have these different opportunities, get a little money, get a little fame.
Sean still has the mattress on the floor. The only thing that has changed is that he drives a nicer truck, and it’s not a bad trait to have because you don’t care about anything other than the task at hand.
Marshall: Yeah, and we’ll see. We saw this fight already and neither of them are different, so we’ll see.
Path to Victory for Each Fighter
Kyte: What are the paths to victory for each guy?
Marshall: I think Sean’s got to make Dricus think about getting put on his back a little bit, to be honest with you. I think he’s got to make him think about it to where maybe he even gets him down once, and Dricus is like, “Okay.”
Because Sean can grapple; he just doesn’t do it.
Full UFC 312 Fight Card Preview
Kyte: I talked to Dricus’ coach before the Izzy fight for a story I was doing on him, and he said that in the first fight, the plan was to put him on the ground at different points in the round, just so he has to get up and he has to know it’s there.
It changes your timing just a little.
Marshall: And in a close round, do you win now? And that’s what that fight was is a close fight.
So Sean has to do that.
Kyte: Sean never grappling is one of the weirdest things to me because he’s very good on the ground. I know he’s stubborn and he wants to do his thing, but this is where the not giving a s*** become a detriment, because you have ways to win this and make yourself more successful.
And he doesn’t do it.
Marshall: (He doesn’t have to wrestle) a ton, and you’ve gotta win. It’s not just about winning fights that you dominate.
Kyte: You’ve gotta find a way to win the ugly, messy fights.
UFC 312 COUNTDOWN: Du Plessis vs Strickland 2 | Zhang vs Suarez | Full Episode
Marshall: Ugly, messy fights.
Kyte: And his style lends to being in these close fights, and his losses are in close fights; Cannonier, the first one with Dricus.
Marshall: All the fights are close. He doesn’t have a ton of power, so he’s not really knocking anybody out.
Kyte: Unless he’s steamrolling somebody, it’s gonna be 48-47.
Marshall: Right, but even if it’s 50-45, let’s say — this is what’s missed when people hear 50-45.
That can be a really close fight where one thing in each round swings it in your favor. First round, a takedown in the last 45 seconds; you win the round with a couple good elbows, but it was close for four-and-a-half minutes.
Be on the winning end of that.
Kyte: And do what you’ve got to do in order to be on the winning end of that.
So that’s Sean; what’s the road to another successful title defense for the champ?
RELATED: Rise Of Sean Strickland
Marshall: Do it again. Do the same thing again.
Make Sean go backwards. Put him on his back heel, get him leaning back, throwing that jab leaning back, and be ugly like you always are.
Kyte: I wanna go back and re-watch it because, to me, Sean has moments where he looks really uncomfortable going backwards, and optically — and I know Eric is a big proponent of this — it hurts him, because you look like the guy that is shying away from the engagement and doesn’t want to be in there.
Marshall: But he does. He’s not upset. But you’re right, for sure.
Kyte: And when you’re Dricus who is always charging forward, optically —
Marshall: Dricus’ attack is so aggressive, optically, and Sean’s attack is not that aggressive, so when you look at this fight optically, the moments when Sean was aggressive, you weren’t like, “He’s whoopin’ that ***;” you never are.
But when Dricus goes and he gets that chaos going, it just looks so optically like he’s winning that moment.
Kyte: And he’s got enough power that it registers more.
Marshall: Again, it’s that dog — he’s going a little harder.
X Factor
Kyte: So we covered the X-factor a little earlier in that is comes down to who is gonna be the bigger bully.
Marshall: Yeah, but let’s talk Xs and Os a little bit.
The person that can be the bigger bully is gonna put the other person on their back foot, so that’s why this is important. If you’re on your back foot — neither one of them fights well going backwards, and, for Sean, it optically looks bad. For Dricus, he’s gonna be more tired fighting off his back foot, because it’s not what he’s used to.
So if Sean can do that to him, consistently, over time, you’ll see in the fourth and fifth rounds, that’s where that little change will be and Sean will look like the bigger bully. He’s the one pressing the action because Dricus will be more tired and slower when he’s trying to press.
That will be the X-factor of this bully thing.
It’s gonna be early when it occurs, but the effects will be late.
Kyte: It’s the Merab-Umar fight and the Erin Blanchfield-Rose Namajunas fight. The people that lost those fights won the first two rounds, but they were working backwards a lot, they were getting pressured a lot, having to contend with “this MFer is in my space, not giving me any room; this is tiring and suffocating and I wish they would take a backwards step.”
That didn’t happen and they couldn’t keep doing it.
Marshall: And it’s not even that they don’t want to do it — they just physically can’t do it anymore; they can’t continue what they’ve been doing.
One Coaching Curiosity
Kyte: Okay, so what’s the one curiosity point here for you? The piece of that, after seeing it the first time, you’re like, “I wanna see how this goes?”
Marshall: Can Nicksick pull it outta Sean? Can they come up with a game plan like they did with Izzy — and it’s gonna be different than it was with Izzy — but that’s gonna surprise us in some way to where we’re like, “Oh s*** — they figured that out!”
To me, that’s what it is. Did they figure something out to put Dricus on the back foot and make these things happen — to look like the bully and all the stuff we talked about. Most of it is in how he’s gonna approach the attack in the early rounds; that’s where it’s gonna happen, because if it’s late rounds — if Sean is down 3-0, it’s gonna be tough.
Kyte: I even wonder if Nicksick has gotten through to Sean a little bit more that “Listen man — we end up in these close fights, we end up on the wrong side of it, so we’ve gotta control the stuff we can control, which means you’ve gotta do a little more.”
How To Watch UFC 312 In Your Country
In addition to game planning, has he used that loss as something to look at Sean and say, “Wasn’t it better when you were the champion? So can you do one or two more things?”
Marshall: And we’re talking early rounds again, because I think we’re gonna be 2-2 going into the fifth; that’s my guess, and how did we get to 2-2 is really important. What does the corner look like for both people in between the fourth and fifth rounds?
Was it Dricus won the first round, Sean eked out the second? The third round is gonna be very telling. I think the third is gonna tell us how the fight is gonna go.
Hear me out here: if somebody wins the third and it’s 2-1, whoever wins that third, that person is gonna have momentum going into the fourth, especially if Dricus pushed a little more to go up 2-0 and then Sean won the third. That’s gonna put some pressure on Dricus that he’s not gonna like, because he’s gonna think that Sean is the one fading.
Full UFC 312 Fight Card Preview
But let’s say it’s 1-1 going into the third and Dricus wins that round. I could see Sean winning the fourth, but the energy he’s gonna have to use to win the fourth to get it to 2-2 is gonna make it super-hard for him to come do that again the fifth.
That’s why for me, the third round is gonna be very telling.
Kyte: I don’t think either of these guys are “We can be down 2-0 and it’s okay” fighters.
I said in the Merab-Umar instalment of this that I don’t think Merab cares if he loses the first two rounds as long as he’s been moving forward and largely dictating the pace, because he trusts his conditioning that much. I don’t think either of these guys wants to be down 2-0 or be on the wrong end of 2-1 heading into the fourth.
Marshall: I think Sean can be the guy on the wrong end of 2-1 as long as he won the third.
Kyte: I think there is more space for Dricus to have success, because he’s got a little more power, because he’s got a little more in the way of finishing abilities…
Marshall: And he wrestles. And he ekes out close rounds, and Sean doesn’t.
FOLLOW @UFCNEWS: On Facebook | On Instagram | On X
Kyte: Sean doesn’t have that “I’m down 3-1 and I need to find a finish;” he can’t go and create a finish, where Dricus can go and try to create havoc and see what happens.
Marshall: Sean doesn’t create havoc. He knocked Izzy down, but after that, there was no havoc.
Kyte: It’s gonna be interesting.
Marshall: Yes it is.
UFC 312: Du Plessis vs Strickland 2 took place live from Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney Olympic Park, New South Wales, Australia on February 8, 2024. See the final Prelim & Main Card Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC FIGHT PASS!