Stainless Steel: A Look At Geoff Neal
170 is one of the most fatally mismanaged divisions in MMA, and nothing proves this more than the unfortunate 15-20 hopefuls trying to press forward. Each one is being forced to take the scenic route to contention as former lightweights such as Kevin Lee and Anthony Pettis (and even less successful ones like Michael Chiesa) have gotten much more fruitful opportunities in a fraction of the time. Combined with Nate Diaz bafflingly taking up a top-10 spot, the division might be the most stagnant relative to its talent level.
This hard path to a number can go one of three ways, and in recent times, we’ve seen all of them happen. Leon Edwards was the most successful; he was able to beat everyone in front of him with relative comfort (despite bizarre lateral steps like Gunnar Nelson) and took full advantage of his bout with Rafael dos Anjos to become a bona fide top contender. Vicente Luque was a bit more unfortunate; his brutal run through the unranked got a bit more difficult near the end but he managed it, only for his step-up against Stephen Thompson to be a venomous one. The worst case (and what the UFC is risking for every prospect at 170) is what happened to Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos, who never made it to an opportunity; he destroyed most of his unranked opposition, but eventually ran into an unheralded matchup in Li Jingliang that just proved all wrong for him.
After his UFC 245 bout against Mike Perry, Neal looks like he’s avoided the ZDS path; while Neal’s fight prior was shaky, the man who nearly spoiled Luque didn’t touch “Hands of Steel”, and Neal is now in a position to fight up the rankings in a division that’s bloated with fighters who are either overranked or inactive (or both). As anyone at 170 would, he’s had his moments of trouble with the diverse set of skills he’s faced before even facing a top-15, but he’s also essentially cleared the unranked gauntlet inside one calendar year. It’s always possible that he gets booked against a bad matchup for him and settles into the role of an action-fighter, but for now, he seems like an exciting contender-in-waiting; a flawed one, like every prospect, but one with promise.
The Basic Southpaw
Funny enough, Neal’s cleanest performances in the UFC have come against two opponents who have dragged most of their opponents into some of the messiest of their careers; while Mike Perry and Frank Camacho don’t have impressive records nor many meaningful wins, their reputations are based more on pulling fun and competitive fights out of the best prospects. In that sense, Neal’s absolute shutouts over the pair of them are a lot more significant than the wins that others have over them. Aside from Beneil Dariush (one of the most skilled lightweights in the world), no one to date has taken apart Camacho like Neal did, and no one had finished Perry with strikes when Neal did.
The best fight to start with is probably his most recent; Neal’s win at UFC 245 over “Platinum” Mike Perry was his quickest in the UFC, and showed the core of his game against an opponent not quite cultured enough to throw it off in any way. Perry was meant to be a genuine test, though; his previous fight was a narrow split decision loss to Vicente Luque, another blue-chip prospect at the time, and he looked much improved as a boxer to work around the Brazilian’s high-guard. Rather than go through all that trouble, Neal just nuked him in 90 seconds.
Neal plays a sniping southpaw game; against a Mike Perry who was looking to manufacture longer exchanges, Neal is laterally active on the outside and begins to set up the straight-left (feinting it, and angling off the entry he finds).
Even when Neal finds the straight, he doesn’t stick around; it’s a quick shot that he can slip in off-rhythm, and he can retreat quickly. The straight is damaging for sure, particularly in a longer fight where he can find dozens, but the second component makes it a trickier game than just one of traversing pure speed.
The classic southpaw switchup, and Neal’s game rests almost entirely on this common concept. Neal’s straight-left is so quick and tough to avoid (in the open-stance) that the opponent relies on the movement of his shoulder to begin evading before he extends; Neal plays those reactions off the rear-kick, which he aims this time to the body.
The finish comes because of this setup, and it’s the reason why Neal’s head kick (along with that of others like Mirko ‘Cro Cop’ Filipovic) is so consistently dangerous. Perry seems to be trying to counter-jab the rear straight, only for Neal’s kick to smash him in the head. Neal continues to use the head kick to keep Perry backing up and as a complement to his blitz forward (as Perry slips right into the kick on the fence) and uses a frame to track Perry’s head for the finishing straight-left.
It’s a simple game, and some version of it is used by a great deal of the southpaws at a high-level (since the rear-straight and the rear-kick are the natural things to throw from the open-stance) but one helped a lot by the athleticism of Neal; having a terrifically quick left-straight often leaves his opponent leaning readily into the more devastating blow, and any sort of hesitation leaves the straight in play.
Neal’s bout with Frank “The Crank” Camacho was more of the same over a longer fight; while Beneil Dariush using similar tools to play havoc with Camacho’s reactions devalued the win a bit in retrospect, it still isn’t common for a fighter to put Camacho through the wringer without going through the same. At the time, Camacho was off three wars, including against current up-and-comers Li Jingliang and Drew Dober; Neal made a foe so consistently tough seem like he didn’t belong in the same ring as him.
Camacho starts slipping to the outside of the straight from the beginning, and starts slipping to nothing early too; Neal tries to run him into the head kick early. This was the bulk of the fight.
Neal’s strength in switching up the rhythm of the straight helps a lot in keeping his opponent unaware of both options. Doubling up on the straight is a good example; he didn’t do it particularly often, but the second one caught Camacho completely flat. This comes back into play when Neal’s flurrying; he can mix up the rhythm of each of his attacks and work around a guard, and the flying knee he landed was the same way he lands the head kick (playing it off the straight by drawing the slip).
As a fighter who primarily works at range, it’s important for Neal to have tools to mitigate/limit/punish close-quarters exchanges; he isn’t very comfortable in deeper and wilder trades, but he can cut them off early. What really undid Camacho’s offensive efforts and his attempts to pressure were Neal’s defensive frame and exits on angles; Neal was constantly framing proactively (off his own rear hand) or reactively (as Camacho started to flurry). Creating distance and forcing Camacho to keep turning left the banger’s offense shortchanged, and the frames left him completely ineffectual — and this is vital for Neal, who isn’t the deepest in the pocket past walking his opponent onto the straight.
This was a nice switch-up off that defensive frame; Neal drove his lead hand inside Camacho’s lead-hook to stuff it, and mixed that frame with a throwaway jab to draw the counter. The next time Camacho threw the left hook, Neal knew he was at the end of his own reach and out of range, and just waited for Camacho to finish to crack him with the 1-2.
As cool as the rest of the fight was, the rear straight/kick is still the most powerful pair of tools in Neal’s arsenal, and that’s what ended it. Camacho just slipped clean into the kick, as he couldn’t react quickly enough this time to take some sting off after it was apparent that Neal was kicking.
While not the best of the best, Neal passed two of the premier violence-men of the division with flying colors; that said, the fights in which Neal found some trouble are also worth looking at. He’s undefeated in the UFC, but Niko Price and Belal Muhammad went about exploiting the same general liability in two drastically different ways.
Finding Answers
Following the destruction of Camacho, Neal would’ve had the public push to realistically get a shot at the rankings; instead, the UFC booked him against Belal Muhammad, a test for a prospect in a way Camacho isn’t. Where the others Neal faced on the edge of the rankings were defined by stopping-power, Muhammad was defined by thoughtfulness and craft; it was a fight that Neal could win with his big athletic margin, but could also possibly lose if any particular facet of his game was commensurately weak. Neal passed that test, breaking Belal down and nearly finishing him in round 3, but Belal found his opening nonetheless.
Round 1 went well enough for Geoff; he took more of a front-foot role than usual, looking to back Muhammad into the fence to cut him off with kicks, but he did a decent job of it. One of his cleaner shots was with changing his steps up a bit; Neal often bounces back and forth in his stance, and off a retreat here, he followed the forward-bounce with a longer leap forward to catch Muhammad as he thought Neal was resetting.
Muhammad did some work trying to get behind Neal’s high guard with the wide overhand, but most of it was the bodywork; he could feint or jab to get Neal’s guard up, and rip his body underneath. This was a crafty adjustment, one that could pay dividends down the line given Neal’s strength/speed possibly coming at a cardio cost.
Neal’s response was to attempt to work on the counter a bit more, trying to keep Muhammad from getting those throwaway shots (to raise the guard) or the body shots for free; he still didn’t have a real defensive answer, which sometimes led to Muhammad smashing the body as Neal punched him in the head.
Not the most elegant solution, but it mostly worked; Muhammad stopped being able to chip away with no consequence, and Neal’s game took over. The head-kick was nice, as instead of feinting a straight, Neal just threw a noncommittal rear-hand and flicked the kick right behind it. Muhammad’s takedown attempts stopped coming for free too, as Neal smashed him on breaks and combo’d into vicious flurries, and he stopped being able to throw volume on the high-guard as Neal needled him when he came forward.
Muhammad’s craft can be contrasted to Niko Price’s sheer ferocity; the unstructured “Hybrid” posed a different problem to Neal’s fairly rote defense, and unlike the Muhammad fight, Neal never found any sort of answer on the feet. Where Camacho wasn’t really the puncher to make exchanges individually dangerous and Perry just never got to exchange at all, the comically dynamic Price presented a challenge with very little margin for error. Neal won by turning to his wrestling at times and eventually winning from on top, a sign that’s promising in a way but worrying in another.
Neal was fairly reliably able to pull Price into big shots near the beginning of an exchange, as Price is not a nuanced striker in the slightest; where Price found success was in denying the resets of Neal. If Neal landed, Price just looked to come back with 3 or 4 more, and Price’s heavy-handedness meant that Neal could afford to take none of them clean. Every time Neal started one of those chaingunning combinations (where he’s terrifically dangerous when in full control), Niko committed to just swinging with him in any way possible, and Neal was the one trying to bail out.
Reckless dynamism comes at a cost, though, and here it was Price pulling a guillotine and ending on the bottom. Neal took advantage, and drubbed him from inside the guard.
Niko Price is a unique challenge for his attributes alone, and he seemed to have a good idea of the fight he wanted here (even if that’s the sort of fight he always wants); while someone like Luque buzzsawing Price was a better sign than Neal struggling to get through him, Neal showed he was able to survive a dogfight here. In a division that’s almost defined by high-paced fights that are easy for neither man, Neal showed something important against Price, even if it wasn’t what he was supposed to show.
Concluding Thoughts
Where does Geoff Neal go from here? Since his torching of Mike Perry, the push for Geoff to face Santiago Ponzinibbio (ranked #7 but with no fight in over a year) has grown. It’s a compelling fight; on paper, Ponzinibbio is the best opponent Neal will have faced, but he also struggled mightily with Perry, and his game mostly being a jab/outside leg kick is likely to cause some issues dealing with the southpaw Neal. Another option is Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson, who has generally struggled with strong kickers but also requires a disciplined sort of fight and intelligent gameplanning that Neal hasn’t shown yet. With one win at that level, “Hands Of Steel” will be in position to face the top of the division, fighters like dos Anjos and Covington, who can test areas that Neal hasn’t proven excellent in yet (facing other southpaws, which complicates the changeup, and consistent wrestling).
In a wrestler’s division, it’s hard for a striker to make a mark, and in a stagnant division, it’s hard for anyone new to shine; it’s a testament to Geoff Neal’s skill that he’s been able to do both. Regardless of whether he goes on to be top-5 or top-10 or even just tops out at top-15 (where he is now), he’s proven an interesting fighter and a dangerous one for nearly anyone.
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