#9: Frankie Edgar
Photo by Nick Laham/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
The mark of a truly great fighter is their ability to age gracefully. Clichéd as it may be, Father Time remains undefeated and competitors in sports as physically and mentally demanding as this one can’t remain their springy youth forever. If a fighter builds their style around an enormous athletic advantage, it might work early in a career, even to great success. As the fast-twitch speed starts to lag behind a few gears and the unbreakable chin begins to chip, however, it can make the late stages of a once-premier athlete quite difficult to watch, as they struggle to perform the movements their younger selves reveled in. There’s a reason Tyron Woodley isn’t on this top 20.
On the other hand, depth of skill remains as time rolls on and Frankie Edgar is the perfect example of a fighter who met his waning physicality with a deepened wealth of tactical and strategic prowess. If you were to watch a fight early in Edgar’s UFC tenure and then another much later into his career, Edgar would never be unrecognizable stylistically. Over time, however, the subtler elements of Edgar’s game began finding their way to fold.
Movement was always at the core of his standup, but he became far more deliberate with his footwork, taking better angles and sitting down on his punches. Takedowns weren’t simply a tool for scoring points. It became Edgar’s greatest phase within a fight. Smashing Cub Swanson, B.J. Penn, and Yair Rodriguez is all well and good, but beating the piss out of Charles Oliveira from top position? Good lord. As the years rolled on, layers of Edgar’s game began synthesizing more and more. Tighter movement meant Edgar was better positionally on the inside. This allowed for more body shots, which masked takedown entries. The threat of the takedown opened up the head as a target for Edgar’s polished left hook.
Frankie’s heart became the central talking point regarding the undersized wrestleboxer, but not enough credit was attributed to his intelligence as a fighter. Watching all three B.J. Penn fights back-to-back reveals a startling narrative, as Edgar grows more and more confident in figuring out the plodding Hawaiian in front of him. Jab-single leg? No luck. Jab-body punch-knee tap, OK, that kind of worked. Knee tap-left hook-angle out. So on, and so forth. Edgar puts the pieces of his game together expertly tactically and strategically, which made his mid-career drop to featherweight more galvanizing than his championship run at lightweight.
As Edgar’s athletic prime started to leave him, his technical game deepened and he became a much better fighter as a result. His first performance against Cub Swanson is one of the most overwhelming displays of wrestling I’ve ever seen in MMA. After throwing away a handful of weak takedown attempts in the first round, Edgar got a hold of Swanson and absolutely throttled the life out of him for the remaining 24.9 minutes. As someone who enjoys striking vastly more than grappling in the context of this sport, Edgar’s performance was as destructive as it was entertaining. This was the same guy who pot-shotted B.J. Penn for 25 minutes in their first bout?
It’s hard to talk about Edgar without talking about his losses. Frankie became the king of debatable losses during his run at lightweight with a combination of solid point-fighting and an unwritten rematch clause in his contract. The first Benson Henderson fight was quite close throughout, and Edgar put forth one of his best performances in the rematch, which he hilariously did not win. The epic trilogy with Gray Maynard was quite definitive, as the third fight ended via KO for Edgar, despite a 1-1-1 scorecard across three fights. The unbelievably rare draw that their second fight was scored as remains an enormous anomaly.
No, the notorious brick wall Edgar ran into over his career was Jose Aldo, the only fighter Edgar did not arguably beat. MMA’s greatest defensive fighter nullified every trick that Edgar had up his sleeve. Edgar would feint and jab his way into range, but Aldo would already have pivoted and redirected Edgar’s momentum. The wrestling was like watching a child against a man, as Aldo limp-legged out of every entry from range, built his base with stunning speed along the fence, and never allowed Edgar to get his chain-wrestling rolling. An iron-bar of a jab marked Edgar up on every entry, and Frankie’s vaunted cardio advantage meant nothing, as he simply couldn’t leverage anything of value on Aldo.
The second fight was arguably the finest performance of Aldo’s career, and it was at the unfortunate expense of Frankie Edgar on a five-fight winning streak from their first meeting. Despite possessing all the momentum going into the contest and despite a revamped tactical approach to the Brazilian, Aldo was two-steps ahead of Edgar at every turn. Aldo’s jab was the story of the first fight, so Edgar entered the contest with trigger counters to the jab. Aldo didn’t seem to mind, as he replaced his jab with an equally potent counter right hand. The wrestling dynamics were even more lopsided in Aldo’s favor this time around, and Edgar’s tactical preparation just didn’t appear to work at all. There was no debate to be had at the end of this one.
Across 25 UFC appearances, Edgar was only ever the taller fighter once in a title eliminator against Chad Mendes. In a rare moment of salient commentary from Mike Goldberg, he noted that Edgar vs. Bendo looked like a future featherweight versus a future welterweight, a prescient remark that turned out to be true. Even when Edgar did drop to 145, featherweights got larger and longer, with opponents like Yair Rodriguez outsizing Edgar by a hilarious degree. It’s worth noting that if it weren’t for a contentious decision in the rematch, Edgar would (likely should) have a victory over all three of these men.
Lightweight is a division with giants like Tony Ferguson, Justin Gaethje, and Paul Felder. To think that Frankie Edgar was once champion of this division seems almost unrealistic. Even featherweights began outsizing Frank, over time. In another universe, Edgar probably could’ve become a dominant bantamweight champion, mauling opponents roughly his own size with an insane strength and physicality edge. However, Frankie never complained. No matter who stood in front of him, Edgar approached them all with the same tenacity and fearlessness. Considering how many of these fights he won, Frankie Edgar should be the greatest example of why not cutting weight can be even more beneficial to a fighter’s longevity.