Timmy Cuamba vs Louis Jourdain: How Cuamba Won With Four Takedowns

Two days before UFC Fight Night: Buckley vs Malott, I wrote a breakdown of how Timmy Cuamba beats Louis Jourdain. It said three things. Cuamba loses first rounds, so he had to survive this one. He should look for takedowns in the second. And he is not a submission fighter, so the plan was top position and time, not a finish.

Cuamba won the first round on the mat, took Jourdain down in the second as well, and submitted him at 2:48 of it. I got the destination right and the route wrong in almost every particular, and the route is the interesting part, so let's look at it.

The first round he was supposed to lose

The case for worrying about Cuamba early was real. In five of his six fights under the UFC banner he had lost the first round on the strike count, and Jourdain had dropped Magno Dias in each of the first two rounds of his Contender Series win. If the fight stayed at range for five minutes, Jourdain's volume was the obvious threat.

It did not stay at range. Cuamba went 3 for 3 on takedowns in the first round and spent 3 minutes and 36 seconds of it in control, 72 percent of the round. Jourdain's one takedown attempt failed. On the feet and on the floor together, Jourdain landed 3 significant strikes from 21 attempts in those five minutes. Cuamba landed 9 of 26.

Put that next to his history and it is a different fighter. Across his six previous UFC-banner fights, Cuamba landed 6 takedowns from 19 attempts. He landed 3 in one round here, and 4 for the night, without missing one. His previous best for control in a whole fight was 5 minutes and 55 seconds against ChangHo Lee over fifteen minutes. He had 4 minutes and 47 seconds of it here in 7 minutes and 48 seconds of fighting.

The fix for a slow starter is not always to start faster on the feet. Sometimes it is to stop starting on the feet at all. That was the adjustment I expected Cuamba to make in round two, after he had seen Jourdain's hands. He made it in the first round instead.

What Jourdain never got to do

The other half of the pre-fight case was Jourdain's striking, and specifically his leg kicks: 18 of his 64 significant strikes on Dias went to the legs. I spent a section telling Cuamba to check the calf.

He hardly had to. Jourdain landed 4 leg strikes from 11 attempts all night. He landed 2 significant strikes to the head from 18 attempts. For the fight he finished 9 of 36, 25 percent, and every one of those nine came at distance; he landed nothing in the clinch and nothing on the ground.

What stands out is that the standing exchanges were close. At distance Jourdain landed 9 of 35 and Cuamba 11 of 35. Cuamba threw no leg kicks at all and spread his work between the head and the body, 6 of his 11 distance strikes landing to the body. Nobody was winning the kickboxing match by much, and that is exactly why the takedowns decided it. Jourdain's whole UFC résumé before Saturday was one fight against an opponent who went 2 for 4 on takedowns against him and could not keep him down. He had never been held on the bottom for most of a round at this level, and the first time it happened, he had no answer to it.

The second round and the finish

Round two looked like round one in miniature. Cuamba landed 13 of 24 significant strikes to Jourdain's 6 of 15, landed his fourth takedown in his fourth attempt, and had 71 seconds of control before the finish at 2:48.

Of Cuamba's 22 significant strikes for the fight, 8 landed on the ground, all of them to the head, from 11 attempts. That is a high hit rate from top position, and it is the ground-and-pound that turns control time into something the other man has to react to. The official result is a submission at 2:48 of the second round, and it was Cuamba's only submission attempt of the night, and his first in a UFC fight. Jourdain had one attempt of his own, in the first round.

That finish is the line I would underline twice. In our records every one of Cuamba's previous professional wins came by knockout or decision, and in his own two losses by submission, including the one to Benardo Sopaj in May, he was the one caught. The man I described as having no submission game in the UFC ended a fight with one.

What the numbers said before, and what they say now

Our model gave Cuamba 63.3 percent before the fight, its biggest disagreement with the market on the card. The consensus line had opened with Jourdain at -195 and Cuamba at +160, and by fight night it had come in to -161 and +135, which still made Cuamba a clear underdog at about 43 percent implied. The prop market had Cuamba by submission at +1197. That is information about what the market believed, not a lesson about betting, and the market's belief was built on a single excellent Jourdain performance.

That was the sample-size argument in the preview, and it held. The part that did not hold was my reading of Cuamba. I built his case from six fights of first-round deficits and late adjustments. On Saturday he did not need the adjustment, because he walked out with the answer already in hand.

The principle

A fighter's habits are a description of what he has done, not a contract about what he will do. Cuamba's habit of losing first rounds was a product of choosing to strike with people early. Against Jourdain he chose differently, and the habit disappeared with the choice.

Jourdain is a good fighter who now has a problem he did not have before Saturday: everyone has seen what happens when he is put on his back and kept there. His next opponent will have film of it. Cuamba's next opponent will have film of something too, a wrestler who was not supposed to exist.

The full stats, round by round, are on the event page, and Cuamba's profile and Jourdain's carry their updated records.