The Bottom Line: Gauging Greatness

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It’s rare to see so much mixed martial arts royalty share the same location as it did on Saturday at Bellator 290, where Fedor Emelianenko exchanged hugs and shook hands with Randy Couture, Mark Coleman, Dan Henderson, Chuck Liddell, Matt Hughes, Royce Gracie, Renzo Gracie, Josh Barnett, Chael Sonnen, Quinton Jackson and Frank Shamrock following his retirement fight. These are some of the most accomplished and transformational figures in the history of the sport, and it would be nice if MMA gathered together its legends more often.

No one would question whether Emelianenko belongs in such company. Clearly, the longtime Pride Fighting Championships titleholder ranks among the greatest fighters of all-time. However, his retirement again fosters debate about whether he belongs in the GOAT discussion as compared to the likes of Georges St. Pierre, Anderson Silva, Jon Jones and Khabib Nurmagomedov. It doesn’t take much to bring out the Emelianenko doubters, in particular because of his status as by far the most credentialed MMA fighter to never compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Some of the case against Emelianenko doubtlessly stems from that status. The UFC is so ubiquitous today as the top spot for high-level MMA that it’s hard for newer fans, in particular, to wrap their heads around the idea of the best MMA competition existing elsewhere. It’s like trying to imagine the NFL not having the best football players. However, there is a better argument against Emelianenko grounded in more than just ignorance about the power dynamics of the MMA world in the 2000-05 period.

The argument against Emelianenko as a top GOAT candidate starts with the reality that MMA matchmaking in Japan during his peak was very different than UFC matchmaking of today. Rather than being built around high-dollar individual pay-per-view events like today’s UFC, Pride’s financial model was built around live events and television rights. Thus, it had more incentive to keep stars active, and that meant mixing in easier fights. A five-fight winning streak in Pride, as a result, meant less than a five-fight winning streak in today’s UFC, because a star Pride fighter would typically get a Japanese pro wrestler or gimmick fighter with a weird look in between fighting Pride’s elite.

The other key part of the case against Emelianenko is his three-fight losing streak from 2010-11, including being beaten up by Antonio Silva and knocked out by Dan Henderson—someone who fought most often at middleweight and light heavyweight. This was trumpeted by Emelianenko’s critics to suggest he was never that good, and even if you reject that premise, it’s reasonable to argue that it’s a major strike against the case of someone for greatest of all-time.

GOAT discussions are inherently subjective, and there’s no way to know how fighters of different eras and sizes would fare against each other if all other factors were made equal. However, there remains very good reason to believe in Emelianenko as someone in the top handful of MMA fighters to have ever competed.

Anyone being considered for GOAT status had to have had sustained excellence against top-flight competition. Thus, the biggest question with Emelianenko was whether the fighters he beat during a 33-fight run where he was ostensibly unbeaten—his cut loss to Tsuyoshi Kohsaka isn’t as big of an asterisk as Jon Jones’ loss to Matt Hamill, but it’s of a similar quality—were at that level. It’s true he had soft opponents mixed in, but if you take them out, it’s still a historic run. Seven times he beat a former or future UFC champion during that run, and the wins over a prime Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Mirko Filipovic are top-of-the-line victories.

The competition level argument is the stronger point to combat than the argument centered on the losses he had to Silva, Henderson and Fabricio Werdum. Fedor was 33 or 34 years old when those losses took place, not an age at which fighters necessarily decline but certainly an age at which many fighters do. Fighters should be compared based primarily on their primes. St. Pierre was 32 when he retired after a fight with Johny Hendricks, and he only fought one more time. Nurmagomedov’s retirement after his fight with Justin Gaethje came at age 32. Jones was 31 or 32 in his fights with Dominick Reyes and Thiago Santos, where he did not look as dominant as he had during much of his dominant run. The only way to buy that Emelianenko was “exposed” by those losses is to believe that his ferocious performances against Nogueira were never really legit, which is preposterous.

Ultimately, what makes me most confident in a prime Emelianenko’s ability to excel in different eras against different opponents is the way he fought. In the early days of the sport, fighters from one discipline would try to use that discipline to beat opponents whose disciplines didn’t work that well. Over time, more fighters began learning additional disciplines to counteract their opponents’ strengths and to impose their style of fighting. Emelianenko was part of the final evolution to fighters who excelled everywhere.

Emelianenko’s ground-and-pound was ferocious, and his submission defense formidable. He was willing to stand with elite strikers, and he scored spectacular knockouts on his feet. If you wanted to go to the ground with him, he could submit you. Those skills, when he was at his athletic peak with the accompanying speed, strength and durability, made for a vexing puzzle for any opponent to solve. Take a 28-year-old Emelianenko and match him against any fighter there’s ever been, and that foe is going to have a terrible challenge on his hands.