Benavidez and Figueiredo: A Point of Inflection
The UFC's 125 pound division was saved from slaughter, but it nevertheless would be accurate to consider it bleeding; Henry Cejudo proved in 2019 that the flyweights are not lacking in skill (even compared to one of the most robust divisions in MMA), but the purged top-tier talent hasn't been picked back up by the promotion. It's very much Schrodinger's weight-class; sometimes the box is opened with a terrific fight, of a sort that other divisions can't hope to replicate, but the future of the weight (not just in existence, but in quality) is very much in question otherwise. Even fairly recently, there weren't enough fighters to have a full top-15; one would be forgiven for believing 125 to still be on the chopping block, even as it's slowly building back up.
Generally, divisions that way become strictly tiered; truly good fighters are in short supply, so they shoot to the top and stay there, and the only compelling fights are among themselves. In fact, heavyweight and light-heavyweight have existed in this state for years (if not their entire existence). It's a testament to flyweight talent that the top-echelon of the gutted 125 is still made of genuinely phenomenal fighters, as skilled and as rounded as the top of any division. Two of those three will fight for the vacant championship in Norfolk, to fill the void left by now-bantamweight Henry Cejudo. Whether Cejudo completed his stated vision for 125 is in question; regardless, it's up to Joseph Benavidez and Deiveson Figueiredo to continue the work, in one of the most crucial title fights in recent memory. If Benavidez can get it done, the weight-class might still be the most overlooked, but a genuine all-time great gets the due he deserves; if the younger lion rules, the most vicious captain ascends to the helm of the division that needs it most.
Joe-B
If life were fair, Joseph Benavidez would hold a belt going into Virginia. His last fight proved it, as it was functionally a championship bout; Benavidez and his opponent had collectively collected wins over everyone relevant in the division at the time, and their fight was officially an eliminator between two fighters who richly deserved shots at Cejudo before it even happened. Benavidez came out on top, and gets the title shot that had been out of his reach for as long as Demetrious Johnson reigned. Instead of moving back down to 125 to avenge his previous loss to Benavidez, Cejudo has simply vacated the belt; now the most consistently elite contender at flyweight (arguably in all of MMA) has an entirely new mountain to climb, in his bid to stop being the greatest man never to win the belt.
Benavidez is an odd sort of striker, the kind who benefits a lot more from intelligence and craft than from classically-tight mechanics; he doesn’t strike the way a conventional boxer or kickboxer does, but he’s created a system that allows him to play a variety of games against different opponents. The tools he uses largely stay consistent, especially 13 years into an accomplished career, but the way he uses those blitzes differs wildly; Benavidez’s consistency in fighting the right fight (if not immediately, after a round or two) can be considered the biggest key to his success at the top of 125. The best example of this was his rematch against Jussier Formiga, which was likely his biggest win; Formiga was on a winstreak of four that probably should’ve been six, with his win prior being a crafty coup to take the 0 of a spectacularly scary individual, and Benavidez had him figured out from the opening bell.
From the beginning of the fight, Joe did two things: one, he countered in combination, a general staple of his game, and two, he played a body-attacking southpaw double attack that was a specific adaptation to Formiga. As Ed Gallo mentioned here pre-fight, the southpaw body-attack led to at least one meaningful moment in Formiga’s previous fight; Benavidez took the moment and played an entire game around it.
Benavidez’s signature blitzing style serves a purpose; Benavidez can use it to more effectively hide kicks or takedown entries, as the initial-motion looks mostly the same. Here, Benavidez does one of his more common plays: the usual run-up to his combos conceals his entry into an Edgar-esque kneetap, and as soon as he feels it isn’t working, he abandons it with a few strikes and crashes into the clinch with a combo to the body.
With the utility of his style established, it still carries some inherent risk; against a legitimately talented counterpuncher in Formiga, Joe couldn’t get away with much. Shifting as Benavidez does carries the risk of being caught squared-up into counters, as he was throughout this fight and which left him in poor position for defensive maneuvers, and the commitment of the blitz gave the tighter-positioned Formiga opportunities to break the line of attack (as he did with the blow that cut Joe; pivoting slightly as Joe blitzed, taking himself mostly out of the way, and catching an underhook to steer him into the right).
Ultimately, Formiga being the more classically-schooled boxer didn’t really matter; Benavidez knew what he had to do to unravel him, and being the most relentless scrambler in MMA kept Joe in position to do it. Joe’s southpaw double-attack started landing with both parts, as the threat of the body-kick set up the straight, and he voraciously attacked the body any chance he got. Eventually, the body kick got flipped up to the head, Benavidez put a few more combinations together, and that was it.
Formiga isn’t an easy fighter to figure out, as even the best strikers in the division (Sergio Pettis and Figueiredo himself) can testify; Benavidez having such a clear focus of attack is a massive credit to his intelligence as a fighter, and his execution was sterling. Benavidez’s blistering speed in his prime has waned a bit, leaving him a bit more vulnerable playing his game, but he often remains at a big speed advantage in his fights; this leaves him in a good place to work the way he does, with his quick raids and building as he goes.
Of course, one win has appreciated more than the rest for Benavidez, and that is Henry Cejudo; against a somewhat-nascent but still competent Cejudo off a title run that failed at the hands of Demetrious Johnson, Benavidez fought a smart fight that showed what he could do against an opponent who needed great improvements as a striker. Cejudo would eventually land on these improvements and become both the 125 and 135 champion; to date, Benavidez remains the sole unavenged loss of “CCC”.
Cejudo entered the Benavidez fight being thought as mostly a wrestler, so his effective aggression in the fight was something of a surprise; Cejudo won a few early pocket exchanges by coming out hot (aided by his signature blatant headbutting), and did work throughout the fight with body-kicks as Joe went southpaw.
Benavidez found his mark as the fight developed, though. His edge in extended exchanges was notable; Cejudo struggled to deal with Joe’s counters and defensive craft (even though Joe isn’t the best defensively, he’s smart) as he led or countered predictably with big right hands, and Benavidez’s bodywork found no answers on the lead nor the counter.
Cejudo wasn’t (and in fact isn’t) a tremendously diverse defensive fighter or counter threat, and Benavidez took advantage of that the longer the fight went on; he punished Cejudo’s duck-in with knees and uppercuts as Cejudo expected blitzes, punched off kicks liberally, and feinted and angled away from exchanges to throw off Cejudo’s counter-combinations. Another example of Benavidez’s odd mechanics getting the job done regardless; Benavidez is well-aware of the risks of how he fights, which is what makes his ability to do something like leave at an angle as he frames on Cejudo’s head (to keep Cejudo from turning to follow) so integral.
That form of Cejudo isn’t particularly representative of current Cejudo nor Figueiredo; however, it did show what Benavidez can do pushed onto the backfoot against an opponent looking to crowd him. Even with the scoring/reffing controversies, Benavidez came out looking like a more thoughtful fighter than the rawer Cejudo; in a five-round fight, his advantage was only likely to increase.
Of course, despite his most recent run being largely very successful with three phenomenal wins since (Alex Perez, Dustin Ortiz, and Jussier Formiga), the elephant in the room with Benavidez is the fight immediately upon his return; at UFC 225 against Sergio Pettis, some of the inherent issues with Joe’s style reared their head again. Pettis is a far less damning loss than many would believe, as he’s likely the best boxer at 125 even after the UFC decided to let him test free-agency; that said, it remains relevant to Benavidez’s state deep into his career.
Ring-rust might’ve been the issue in this fight, as Benavidez was out since his 2016 meeting with Cejudo when he faced Pettis in 2018. That said, the specific way that Pettis found his counters wasn’t something that would’ve been unavailable to him against an active full-form Joe; Benavidez’s consistent squaring-up on his entries left him target-rich for a sniper in Pettis, especially before he could start figuring Pettis out and building off his initial entries.
Pettis continued to find these counters through the first two rounds, even as his activity waned.
What brought the fight from a wide and catastrophic loss to a close split for Benavidez was his rally late in the fight, doing exactly what he does best; he got the early takedown and started playing it off his strikes, played his blitzing combos off his takedown entries (for example blitzing in and punching through an underhook with the same motion as one of his strikes), and started extending exchanges past Pettis’s first counter (hitting the body and punching off kicks as well). Again, once Benavidez’s game came together in its entirety, he started to take over. It was a courageous performance, where he fell short due to the initial deficit.
As a fighter with a long tenure among the elite, not every fight of Joe could be covered here for the sake of brevity; even restricting it to his later career, his domination of the talented Alex Perez and the spectacular rematch against Dustin Ortiz (which further proved him as MMA’s greatest scrambler) have been omitted. However, what all of those fights suggest is that Benavidez benefits from being an intensely cohesive fighter; his entire game works in concert, and that makes any individual weakness difficult to consistently exploit, even if it leaves him a bit vulnerable early. As a fight goes on, Benavidez is destined to only get more dangerous.
Daico
As appreciable as Benavidez is, even superlative craft and skill were never going to be the things to save the division; many top flyweights, from Pettis to Moraga to Ortiz to Formiga, brought both in great measure, and all but one has left the company. Deiveson Figueiredo is everything those men were missing, and everything that 125 needed amid Johnsonian domination and featherfisted technicians: a consistently violent finisher with a style that demands attention, as well as a sort of bombastic charisma that no one else in the division has possessed. Almost as importantly, he's really good; he's torn through all but one of his opponents, with each since August of 2018 being (at the very least) a real test for anyone. If any current flyweight can bring the flyweights to prominence, "Deus da Guerra" is that man. The path to his coronation isn't easy, as it goes through the most proven flyweight in the world, but a win would be as momentous as any title-fight has been for the entire weight-class.
With Figueiredo’s overwhelming athleticism and a style that seems to use it to the fullest, he’s very easy to pigeonhole into the archetype of someone like Francis Ngannou; however, a far better comparison (in how his attributes relate to his skills) might be top-middleweight Yoel Romero. In a way broadly similar to the later days of the great Cuban, Figueiredo has developed the craft to leverage his rare physicality in all the right ways, against opponents who largely aren’t prepared to deal with raw horsepower used well. As his career has progressed, Figueiredo has been revealed as a sharp counterpuncher who isn’t terribly easy to hit for free, and his biggest asset has been the ability to punch the body as willingly as he does the head; this has led to a lightning-quick rise.
After a 3-0 UFC run of two finishes and a split over the talented wrestler Jarred Brooks, Figueiredo got his first step up: “Chicano” John Moraga. Moraga was one of the many UFC flyweights who ran into all-time great Demetrious Johnson without being prepared for it, and while his record was spotty, he was a sound and challenging opponent for anyone. If anything, Figueiredo was a bit of a predatory booking for Moraga; on a three-fight winstreak where he dominated every win (stiffening Magomed Bibulatov as a decent underdog and defeating the solid Wilson Reis) and earned the #6 ranking, he was booked against an extremely dangerous prospect ranked #14. It proved the wrong contract for the veteran to sign.
It bears mention that Figueiredo is still fairly early in his career, and his 2018 meeting with the experienced Moraga was only 6 years into his pro tenure; the Figueiredo from this fight isn’t the one he is now, but shows flashes of the one he eventually would be. Aggressively countering the jab and pressuring, but Moraga using a sidestep to get Figueiredo walking into a straight caught him unaware (and Figueiredo still isn’t the best defensive-operator, although as seen later, he does develop some tricks). And of course, an athlete like Figueiredo has proven hard to overpower in the clinch.
Figueiredo’s top-game isn’t really anything, and he struggled on the feet against someone he couldn’t pin down; however, the finish shows his mind at work. Figueiredo absolutely wallops Moraga in transition as he gets up to his feet with a right elbow, follows with another one as he shifts to southpaw, and leaps into a right hook behind Moraga’s guard. A hurt Moraga could no longer keep Figueiredo off of him with his footwork, and Figueiredo destroyed him for it with two massive clean body shots that sent Moraga to his knees.
Moraga wasn’t a flawless showing for Figueiredo, but it was certainly a promising one; Moraga had him beat massively on experience and even slickness in the open, but Figueiredo found a way to manufacture an exchange that favored him. Behind the wildness, there was someone smart.
In general, Figueiredo’s struggles have come against wrestlers; as seen against Jarred Brooks and Jussier Formiga (see below), Figueiredo is an explosive and powerful presence but his counterwrestling has mostly been limited to pulling guillotines. On the feet, he’s scarcely been challenged, and his best showing was against the all-terrain threat Alexandre Pantoja; Figueiredo showed his characteristic ferocity at UFC 240, but also underrated craft, and the heart to press on even as Pantoja’s durability showed the downside of dynamism.
In terms of truly meaningful work, most of the first half was a bit of a massacre in Figueiredo’s favor. Figueiredo is not only extremely powerful, he’s terrifically fast in exchanges, and has very quick triggers on his counters. One of the better aspects of Figueiredo’s counter-game is that it’s fairly varied; he had enough answers to Pantoja’s offense between pull-counters and counter uppercuts and straights down the middle that Pantoja couldn’t ever really get a read. He even countered kicks and countered to the body, and can feint to draw offense to counter (for example, squaring his shoulders at the end to convince Pantoja that he was throwing a straight, and interrupting his response with a left hook).
One of the more “new-school” things about Figueiredo’s game is his comfort in the space between the clinch and the pocket; transitional work has been a relative blind-spot in MMA for a good few years, but Figueiredo is quite good at it. He can use collar-ties in exchanges to smother returns or line up elbows, or break from existing clinches with attacks before his opponent can get away cleanly. That was how he did in Moraga, after all.
Late in the fight is where the Romero-Figueiredo comparisons really came into play; Figueiredo’s more consistent counters early turned into him working in bursts, spending more time walking around on the outside and feinting. When he decided to go, he was an absolute menace; an urgent Figueiredo was single-minded enough to simply ignore counters, as he dedicated to crowding Pantoja with slicing elbows (often cutting angles off them to get free shots as Pantoja turned to follow) and shifting combos until he fell over.
The Pantoja fight showed Figueiredo to be capable at working at both a measured pace and a frantic one; when he flips the switch, he’s as dangerous as anyone, and when he hasn’t, he can deter the other man’s aggression extremely comfortably. His tendency to simply look to shove out of bad positions is troublesome against a really strong top-player (as the Formiga fight showed), and is extremely energy-intensive, but it has proven viable in most cases due to his athleticism being absolutely overwhelming.
Figueiredo entered the UFC undefeated, and he tore through the ranks with the confidence of an undefeated destroyer; as such, the veteran Jussier Formiga proved a tough fight for him, as a tremendously composed defensive-boxer who wouldn’t be easy to walk down and was near-unbeatable on the mat. Formiga’s performance against Figueiredo was truly brilliant, and while the fight showed that Figueiredo wasn’t the most polished product, the flaws exploited by Formiga might be flaws that only he is in a position to exploit.
Where many of Figueiredo’s opponents were simply destroyed as Figueiredo forced exchanges, Formiga made a point of firing early and powerful counters to keep Figueiredo from pressing forward aggressively. This was a sharp way to make the fight safer from the start; Formiga didn’t counterpunch as readily in the rest of the fight as he did in the first two minutes, but the tone was set.
Formiga is one of the more understandable losses that a somewhat wild power-puncher can have; the Figueiredo fight was a masterpiece in a defensive sense, even though it wasn’t acknowledged as such. Formiga’s win likely hinged on his top-game on the scorecards, but his entries into his takedowns hinged on his strong head-movement; Figueiredo had next-to-no success leading, as Formiga was at his sharpest as a reactive clincher/takedown-artist. Figueiredo’s tendency to drop for guillotines rather than actually defend takedowns was also shown in his bout against Jarred Brooks, and while he has a good guillotine (as Tim Elliott can attest), it can be a real detriment as shown here.
Where Figueiredo found most of his success was on the counter, often off Formiga’s jab (more details of that dynamic can be found in this article by Ed Gallo). Also of note is Figueiredo’s jab; it’s generally a bit more of a power-jab than a Holloway-esque sort of feeler, and Formiga usually didn’t bite to give Figueiredo exchanges on his terms, but Figueiredo had success when he did. Even against a boxer as well-schooled as Formiga, the counter-selection of Figueiredo is spectacular; sneaking massive uppercuts underneath jabs is terrifically impressive.
As Figueiredo felt the urgency in round 3 (dropping rounds 1 and 2 to Formiga’s top game, even though Figueiredo did more damage from the bottom), what saved Formiga was his footwork and his ringcraft; Figueiredo isn’t necessarily a bad pressurer, but Formiga did a great job stepping offline from Figueiredo’s more desperate charges and keeping away from the fence (as expected from someone of Nova Uniao, home of MMA’s greatest ring general Jose Aldo). He didn’t win round 3 decisively, mostly committing to playing keep-away after racking up some toptime, but it was a great showing against one of MMA’s most dangerous fighters.
It certainly wasn’t a wide loss; Formiga did his best to defuse Figueiredo at the cost of doing minimal damage himself, and Formiga won as a function of being the smarter fighter with a style that was specifically tuned to dealing with an aggressive marauder. Formiga did show that strength on the backfoot and a good reactive shot (since Figueiredo’s massive raids leave them open and he isn’t a great anti-wrestler) could annoy Figueiredo and interrupt him moving forward, but whether anyone at 125 but Formiga could’ve had that performance is questionable.
If there’s one overarching lesson to be learned from all of the above, it might be that Figueiredo is not a particularly systematic fighter. This can be a gift and a curse; on the one hand, the successful things he does are one-offs more than they should be (he doesn’t really build off a jab or commit to extended bodypunching, they’re hard and fast single-exchanges), but on the other, it’s much harder to obstruct him from his game. His wildness forces his opponents to solve all of him simultaneously, because no one tool is of disproportionate utility to “Deus da Guerra”.
Conclusions
This is a very unique fight, the sort where the liabilities of one seems to flow well into the strengths of the other; Benavidez’s own counterpunching and his massive edge down the stretch (especially in 5 rounds, and in a fight where he may enforce his wrestling) is likely to make the fight slip away from “Deus da Guerra” the longer it goes, but Benavidez’s consistent issues in the pocket with Sergio Pettis can’t be ignored against another talented counterpuncher exponentially more potent. Benavidez’s unorthodoxy could lead him into problems that the more conventionally-defensive Formiga didn’t face, but Figueiredo could also prove to simply not be thoughtful enough to pull Benavidez into counters the way Sergio did.
If there’s a issue on which to be confident at all, it is this: the fight will hit a pivot-point past round 2 where the deeper and more cohesive fighter with better cardio takes over, and Figueiredo’s task is to get Benavidez out before that point. This writer believes he will, but mostly as a function of where they are in their careers; while a prime Benavidez might run circles around Figueiredo, trusting him to avoid the blows of a younger and ridiculously dynamic counterpuncher who mixes his targets better than anyone in the division (except Benavidez himself) seems a bridge too far when Benavidez is getting to become the elder-statesman of 125. That said, if Benavidez gets past the point in the fight where his mechanics take a back-seat to all the traps he’s set, Figueiredo is likely not equipped to deal with him.
Nevertheless, whoever wins and despite the nonlineal nature of the title in question, Benavidez/Figueiredo is likely more consequential to its division than any fight in recent memory; Benavidez deserves to hold a championship as much as anyone ever has, but “Daico” is likely the one who can bring it to the esteem that it deserves. With years of Demetrious Johnson holding the belt and arguably still deserving of it, and Henry Cejudo immediately tied up in bantamweight pursuits, the winner in UFC Norfolk is the man to bring 125 into both normalcy and prestige. Long live the flyweights.
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