#7: Jon Jones
Photo by Christian Petersen/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Even despite being placed soundly in the top 10, many would consider the placement of Jon Jones at #7 as far too low; there’s a decently-sized contingent who consider him #1 by far, a destroyer who’s killed legends with ease.
And while that isn’t untrue at all, it also isn’t complete.
The promotion has also bought into Jones as the anointed greatest-of-all-time, as Jones has remained a fixture at #1 pound-for-pound; while the UFC pound-for-pound list is entirely a promotional tool, there’s still a kernel of justifiability in keeping him there. Very few in modern MMA have ruled a division the way Jones has, cleaning it out multiple times and with no man decisively defeating him. As a function of pure longevity, Jones is the cream-of-the-crop without a doubt.
In terms of CV, Jones might have the most recognizable names; Daniel Cormier, Lyoto Machida, Rampage, Shogun—all names held in reasonably high esteem—and none stood a chance in front of “Bones”.
In fact, the mainstream controversy over Jones’ claim as an all-time great has gone almost entirely from placement to eligibility; the consensus is that he’s top-3 if placed at all, but placing him at all is the spot of ferocious debate. Even beyond just a litany of moral failings that have taken him out of competition for years at a time, Jones’ countless drug-test failures have cast his entire career in a different light. While those failures weren’t necessarily totally disregarded in his placement in The Fight Site’s ranking, they also weren’t the biggest barrier to ranking Jones higher than he is. While undeniably a truly great fighter, Jones’ career is the kind that loses a good deal of luster when looking to separate him from other top-ten all-time greats.
A balanced view of Jones reveals a fighter whose dominance is tempered by the shallowness of his division, and whose fully-acknowledged strengths are rivalled by areas of overlooked ineptitude; Jones’ legacy is secure as one of the greatest fighters of his era and one of the best that 205 has ever seen, but some context would do well in placing him accurately among the top 7.
The Rise
Jones’ rise was one of the swiftest in MMA history, regardless of division, and genuinely one of the most impressive that the promotion has ever seen.
Outside of a disqualification loss to Matt Hamill, Jones seemed unstoppable in a way that no other light heavyweight ever has. Part of it was just the level to which his opponents were outclassed athletically (an extremely long 205lber with deceptive strength, Jones simply destroyed any man he could leverage his attributes against), but another was that he didn’t seem to conform to any defined style archetype; simply put, it seemed like Jones just did what he wanted to do, and his mind for the game served as the bedrock for a style that seemed wild and undisciplined but insanely effective. Be it leaping over Ryan Bader to take his back or blasting Stephan Bonnar with a nasty spinning elbow, Jones just seemed to win as he pleased as he went up the ranks, and all of 205 was at his mercy as he did so.
It isn’t to say that he didn’t have the skills to back it up (particularly as a wrestler and as a grappler), but those areas of conventional skill just allowed him to experiment everywhere else. Jones is often treated as an innovator in MMA, and while he hasn’t been inconsequential to the metagame of the sport (the low-line sidekick is the best example), Jones’ tools worked mostly because he was Jon Jones and his opponents couldn’t say the same; as Danny Martin put it, “there's very little coaches can use from Jones' striking mechanics and defensive habits that will likely be replicated in the future”, as his intelligence and his athleticism filled in the holes where his actual striking technique didn’t.
This came to a head against Mauricio “Shogun” Rua, a beloved PRIDE FC import who’d just put an emphatic end to the short-lived Machida era. Rua was a legitimate champion with a pedigree like no one else, and Jones laid waste to the man in a way that no one else had. Rua took a clean flying knee mere seconds into the fight, Jones beat him up from range with his kicks and eventually even with his punches, he manhandled Rua in-close, and the end of the fight was just a formality after Rua was mauled by elbows on the bottom; there wasn’t a place in the fight where Jones was touched.
The Reign
As he went on to defend his belt, Jones’ opponents didn’t really test him more than Rua did; Machida drew out his kicks and countered a bit (but lost all the same) and opponents like Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson and Rashad Evans couldn’t even begin to handle his kicking game at range. From 2011 to 2013, Jones the champion still did whatever he wanted to do; kick at range, frame if he tries to get close, clinch and beat him up, take him down and beat him up. He couldn’t box, but it didn’t matter, because no one could make him box; he didn’t show much defense in the pocket, but it didn’t matter, because no one could sit in the pocket with him without getting clinched or him just leaving.
All the while, Jones was making reads and finding solutions, methodically stripping away what his opponent did best; the Machida win was the best example, as Machida had pulled out Jones’ kicks to counter with the straight, but Jones then feinted the kick to leap into a hook and strangled Machida shortly thereafter. By the time Jones thrashed Chael Sonnen—a middleweight coming off a loss—he had purged the division of the previous generation, and a new generation of 205ers hadn’t made a real mark yet. Jones was in a class of his own, and it seemed like a compelling fight for him was nowhere to be found.
Happily, the promotion stumbled onto one by complete accident.
The next contender for Jones was a Swedish boxer, Alexander Gustafsson, off a win over Rua himself (albeit not a particularly convincing one), and their fight was booked for UFC 165. Predictably, Jones was a massive favorite, and even the UFC struggled to promote the fight; “Greatness Within Reach” was a clever tagline for a fight between two of the rangier light-heavyweights on the roster, but the notion that reach would be the solution to a man so skilled seemed a bit laughable. As it turned out, reach wasn’t the solution, but it was a component of a strategy that severely troubled the champion; Jones looked more vulnerable at UFC 165 than at almost any other occasion, and it revealed “Bones” as perhaps more imperfect than he seemed against the fighters of another time. Jones’ favorite frame wasn’t particularly effective when he was facing someone who could hit him from his own arm’s length, Gustafsson placed a premium on moving laterally that gave Jones’ kicking game trouble (as he’d gone from round-kicking a bit to mostly kicking straight, but kept getting turned by the more mobile man), and Gustafsson was crafty enough as a boxer to show up Jones’ defense if his frame wasn’t effective. Jones (albeit debatably) won that fight, but it was more a function of his extraordinary intelligence and toughness than anything else; spinning into Gustafsson’s dipping jab with an elbow as he looked to seal a round in his favor, and taking over in round 5 as Gustafsson gassed. Jones kept his belt and went on to slice up Glover Teixeira on the inside with ease (taking his right arm out of commission in the process with a nasty crank), but he wasn’t the unbeatable man anymore; Gustafsson didn’t win the fight, but he brought a real fight out of Jones, and that was something new. Jones’ game was still tough to beat, but there was hope; despite his kicks and his clinch and his wrestling, Jones had a range where he was visibly uncomfortable, and that was as big a liability as anyone had ever shown.
In a sport where the most enduring rivalries tend to be the ones where both parties find success (Edgar/Maynard, Whittaker/Romero, McGregor/Diaz, Silva/Jackson, Bisping/Rockhold), it’s fairly surprising that the rivalry that will likely define Jones’ career was the one against Daniel Cormier; many would maintain that Cormier himself is an ATG, but his fights with Jones were not remotely close, and yet the clash of personalities between the two dictated the narrative more than the actual fights did. It didn’t help that many of Jones’ problems with performance-enhancers were during the Cormier feud, as it led to the cancellation of their bout at UFC 200 and the retroactive cancellation of the results at UFC 214. That said, in the cage, there wasn’t much of a doubt who was the better man; where Cormier was a freakish athlete and an accomplished wrestler in his own right, he had no real answers for what Jones brought. Cormier’s weak pressuring mechanics left him squared up and a good mark for Jones’ body work, and Cormier got nowhere in the wrestling; eventually, he tired from eating body shots and chasing Jones around without much return, and Jones took over with a vengeance. If there was a takeaway from Jones’ best wins (beyond just what everyone already knew about Jones), it was his intelligence between fights; when they rematched at UFC 214, Jones did the same thing he did in the first bout, only he finished Cormier with a head kick in round 3. This was a point that would be reiterated in Jones’ subsequent fight (a year-and-a-half later), the rematch against Gustafsson; where Gustafsson took Jones to the limit the first time, Jones had sharpened up his clinch entries and his solutions to Gustafsson’s best weapons in the meantime, and put together a clinical showing to finish him in the rematch with a takedown and strikes on top. The man was back on top, and there wasn’t any doubt (for the time being) regarding Jones’ dominance; he was in-and-out for a bit, between car accidents and drug scandals, but when he was there, he was still the best around.
The Fall
Right as Jones was looking at his most unquestionable, though, his subsequent fights raised more questions, and the most damning was “what does being the best at 205 really mean?” Natural light-heavyweights weren't beyond reproach by any means as resume additions, but at least there wasn't a particularly easy point of comparison; one could poke holes in the skillsets of Gustafsson and Cormier all day long (especially compared to title challengers of stronger divisions, such as Edgar and Mendes), but at the end of the day, they were elite and had only lost to the elite. The rise of former middleweights as top light-heavyweight contenders was a different story, one that has significantly weakened the legacy of Jones even in victory; not only did Jones not necessarily look like a world-beater against opponents who have lost far more conclusively in the past against men meant to be far worse than Jones, the fact that they defeated so many natural light-heavyweights on the way up (without really improving technically) provided evidence that LHW perhaps wasn't as strong as the familiar names made it look.
Jones dominated Anthony Smith, a journeyman who never hit top 15 at 185, but still took him five rounds while looking decidedly pedestrian for decent stretches in the clinch; it was a performance that perhaps showed a conservative streak in Jones even against overmatched opponents (something that wasn't there when he was ripping through the ranks on his way up), and that was somewhat permissible against an opponent who didn't threaten him whatsoever, but the fight against Thiago Santos was much more damning. Santos hit #12 at MW, but got wiped out by Dave Branch in his bid to enter the top 10, and wreaked havoc upon 205 to earn his title shot; in itself, Santos was concerning regarding the field of contenders at 205, and Jones' performance only strengthened the doubts.
Santos is not a nuanced threat, even though he's a dangerous one; a powerful kicking game on the outside, wild flurries if he gets inside, not hard to pressure, and relatively breakable. Jones struggled to close him down on the front foot or deal with the kicking game, and his pocket defense was at its worst; Santos either kicked him at will or exploded forward as Jones followed him, and when he got past the frame, he invariably landed. Jones didn't wrestle much, perhaps due to Santos swinging wild combinations each time Jones stepped forward, and his durability proved his saving grace at multiple points. In the process of getting two rounds in the books, Santos sustained a knee injury which turned into two, and Jones still stuck him at range; as a hobbled Santos found his second wind in round 5, the fight was likely 2-2, and Jones came away with a narrow split against an opponent who was markedly worse (in many people's estimations) than Cormier or Gustafsson, who Jones had summarily finished fairly recently.
Concluding Thoughts
The Santos fight has already gone the way that the first Gustafsson fight did in the public consciousness, as a moment of weakness (if not arrogance) from the great Jon Jones and not indicative of anything more; that said, the latest episode of Jones' career has brought it to an interesting point. Jones' greatness is undeniable, on the length of his reign and the bones he's collected; while a few of his wins have depreciated (Machida going on to being a better middleweight than a light-heavyweight, Gustafsson losing to Smith), the Cormier win is a feat that remains matched only by the greatest heavyweight in UFC history, and his initial run remains one of the most vicious legend-killing sprees that MMA has ever seen.
That said, it's also hard not to question whether Jones is (for lack of a better word) more matchup-dependent than his accolades made him look, comparing his brilliance against Cormier (and fighters like Quinton Jackson, ones that plod in his direction to eat kicks with no answer) to his performances against other opponents on the same or even a lower level. Not only did Gustafsson trouble him with a moderate amount of craft as a boxer, Santos' kicking didn't have much of an answer from Jones, and his clinch game looked downright-anemic at points against Smith; it might be a recent phenomenon or one that simply hasn't been revealed throughout a career of facing opponents at big athletic disadvantages at a weight class where sound boxing is a genuine rarity, but Jones' systemic weaknesses are almost coming to light all at once. It forces examination of Jones as a fighter taking advantage of a division devoid of certain skillsets commonplace at different ones, rather than as a man with no weaknesses.
It isn't often that a fighter placed in the top 10 has to be analyzed in this way to properly contextualize him, to justify his surprising lowness rather than highness, which speaks to the obvious greatness of Jon Jones throughout his career. However, in comparison to the fighters around him, #7 is the place he ought to be.