WHY SHANE CARWIN WILL WIN HIS REMATCH AGAINST BROCK LESNAR

           There are three things I took away from Brock Lensar’s match against Shane Carwin: first, if I’m ever in a foxhole, try to get next to Brock. He has incredible survival instincts and he doesn’t give up. Second, he is not only a tough guy, he is also incredibly disciplined. Third, if Shane had come out with the same level of aggression he displayed in the first round, that fight would have been over and Brock would have been clubbed into submission.

            I had Shane defeating Brock soundly in this fight, and the only thing that surprised me was Shane’s collapse in the second round. So what makes me so sure that Shane will win their rematch? Why so confident that Brock will be knocked out in two rounds or less?

            There is a side of Brock Lesnar that is not understood. Lost amid the relentless hype, fanboy adulation, and Brock’s over-acting is a man who is incredibly driven and intelligent.  I’m not talking about book-learning. I’m talking about a different kind of “athletic intelligence” that very, very few athletes possess.

Some months back I was surfing the net, reading MMA articles, and I came across a version of Brock’s web site, Death Clutch.com. On the site were a series of short training videos. One of them caught my eye. It showed Brock and his teammates sitting on the mats in his training facility in front of a large dry erase board filled with notes concerning techniques, pointers and things to remember. All of it was geared to preparing Brock for his next opponent, who I think may have been Frank Mir.

All at once it hit me: this Brock Lesnar is an extremely bright man, who would spare no expense to prepare himself as fully as he could to be at his absolute best for his upcoming fight. And to do that, he hired a team of experts to coach him to beat the man he was facing. Read that again.  He didn’t hire them to teach him to be the best martial artist. He hired them to help him to beat the man in front of him. This approach says a lot about Brock. He is committed to winning and he is all business.

When he faced Frank in their rematch, it was very clear that there was a strategy at work and Brock was dead-set on implementing it. In Frank he faced a man who is a vastly more experienced martial artist and whipped him. And it was clear that the team behind Brock had prepared him perfectly. They knew that coming off his victory against Brock, Frank would try to submit Brock on the ground. So they practiced an approach that would negate Frank’s vast jiu-jitsu experience, and Brock executed perfectly.

I don’t care what endeavor you’re in – sports, business, whatever – finding people who are cool under extreme pressure and can execute is very, very difficult. To take an athlete with a limited martial arts background and transform him into a champion in a handful of bouts speaks volumes about the athlete and the team behind him. It is a truly remarkable achievement!

But team Lesnar had an advantage going for them that they are not going to have in the eventual rematch with Shane. They had extensive footage showing Brock’s opponents in action, and Brock’s opponents had nothing on Brock. And this was an advantage that Brock’s team used perfectly. In his first bout against Heath Herring, Brock was a completely unknown commodity; an extremely well-trained athlete with a killer game plan that no one had ever seen in action.

That advantage continued through Brocks’s next several bouts. Brock’s team knew his opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, and developed a strategy to exploit their weaknesses. And it worked great until Brock faced Shane Carwin.

With Carwin, you have a striker who won by beating the tar out of everyone he faced in under a round. Very little footage; and all of it basically the same. Not much there. More importantly, it is very hard for someone who doesn’t box to defuse someone who does, unless the boxer has no ground game. This is what Couture is planning against Toney. It’s commonsense. But in Shane’s case, Brock faced someone with basically the same physical size and strength, and the same ground skills. The biggest difference between Brock and Shane is that Shane has been boxing for years and has been coached to punch very effectively.

So what do you do? What would you have told Brock to do? My prediction on the fight was that Brock’s team would not be able to teach him to box in the time they had available, and without a good set of defensive boxing skills, Brock would be in trouble. Boxing is not easy to learn. It takes years of practice, and when boxing skill is coupled with real hitting power, it’s a lethal combination.

We all know what happened in the fight.  Brock was not well prepared for Shane and if Shane hadn’t gassed, he would have taken Brock out.  No question.  And all the articles anointing Brock as the new emperor ignore this glaring weakness in Brock’s game. Even worse, they ignore the fact that boxer Brendan Schaub, who trained with Shane, clobbered Chris Tuchsherer, who trained with Brock! What does this tell you about the camp’s prep for guys who box? It tells me the camp needs to be beefed up with someone who can help with boxing defense.

Folks, I’m sorry, but this isn’t the rise of the “new emperor”; this is the emperor’s new clothes. Setting aside all of the nonsense that is being written about his amazing abilities, you have a guy who has no real defense against a standup fighter if the fighter can defend the takedown. The writers who are saying the Brock has proved his greatness are watching a different fight than the one I saw. I saw a guy whose game plan against a boxer was non-existent.  And the guys who are writing off Carwin are in la-la land.

So what does Brock do now? His next opponent, Cain Velasquez, is a guy who hits very hard and will be looking to do exactly what Shane did. For Brock to survive, he must be coached by his team to box defensively or fight on the ground. My guess is that Brock is being coached to fight on the ground based on his submission of Shane. It’s a more natural transition for a wrestler to learn submission moves than to teach him to box. And Brock has huge power to muscle his opponents with on the ground.

So why am I so sure that Brock will lose in his rematch to Shane?

As I mentioned earlier, one of the keys to Brock’s success has been the fact that there is no footage of him. But in his next two bouts he will face excellent standup fighters. Assuming Brock wins these fights, they will expose the approach that Brock will take against Shane in their rematch, and Shane’s team will be watching carefully to develop a counter.   

When Brock meets Carwin for a rematch – and there will be a rematch – Carwin and his team will have seen how Brock handled both Velasquez, and the winner of the Roy Nelson/Junior Dos Santos bout. And make no mistake: Carwin’s team is stocked with just as good a brain trust as Brock’s. By seeing what kind of defensive skills Brock has developed, they will be able to coach Shane around that defense.

I’ll throw in one more element that will favor Shane for good measure. Fear. Brock is one tough guy, but he knows that if Shane lands a clean shot, he’s going down. It takes a unique fighter to deal with that. As tough as Brock is, and as confident as he is, I think he will be going into a rematch with some anxiety about whether he can really take Shane. Because if Shane hadn’t gassed, Brock was done for and he knew it. He will not enjoy the same confidence level he had when he went into the second Mir fight. In fact, the roles will be reversed. Shane will be thinking he has what he needs to destroy Lesnar if he can avoid a submission, and Lesnar will be thinking submission. Interesting turn of events, right?

So what do you think?  Is Brock as good as his fans think?  Or is he heading for a fall when he faces Shane.  You know who I think will win: Shane by knockout.