UFC 200 is the biggest event of the year, and the fight at the top of the card carries a long-ranging narrative with it. In the main event, light heavyweight kingpin and former Olympic wrestler Daniel Cormier faces his nemesis, interim and former champion Jon Jones, the man responsible for the only defeat of Cormier's career.
Since their first meeting in January 2015, Jones was stripped of his belt and then spent 15 months on the shelf before winning an interim title in April against Ovince Saint Preux.
Cormier had epic fights against Anthony Johnson and then Alexander Gustafsson, first winning and then defending the light heavyweight crown.
Despite the fact that Cormier is officially the division's champion, that loss to Jones looms over both his title and the two rivals' rematch at UFC 200 on July 9.
The champion has no illusions about what went wrong in his first fight with Jones, and his assessment of his younger rival, what he did right and wrong, and what he has needed to fix in the interim is brutally honest. Cormier is a sharp, critical observer of the sport, a tendency reinforced by his regular work as an analyst for Fox Sports 1, and he has turned that penetrating gaze to work on himself and his first performance.
Cormier grasps the basic dynamic of the fight perfectly.
"There's no way he can keep me off of him for 25 minutes," he said. "I'm going to land shots. In boxing range, I'm a better boxer. As the fight progressed and he was taking those shots, he started initiating those clinches. He clinched because he was getting hit. He needed to find a way to slow it down."
There are two reasons why Jones has been effectively unbeatable during his UFC career, and Cormier just hinted at one of them.
First, Jones knows how to use his incredible height (6'4") and reach (84 inches) to keep opponents at long range with a steady stream of kicks and straight punches. He can hit them there, and they can't hit him—at least not with any regularity.
This is the most commonly cited reason for Jones' long period of dominance, but it's not the whole story.
Second—and this is what Cormier nodded to above—Jones is a monstrous clinch fighter. If his opponents do get inside his freakishly long reach, Jones can simply grab ahold and slice them to pieces with knees and elbows or work some of his slick trips and throws. When he got in trouble in the pocket, Cormier noted, Jones could simply go to work in the tie-ups.
This twofold challenge means that opponents have to move forward to get inside the reach, but they can't move so far inside that they risk running into the wood-chipper that is Jones' clinch game.
Instead, they have to walk a tightrope of distance where they're in range to land punches, but not so far in or so far out that Jones can use his effective tools.
While Jones has improved in the last several years, he's still awkward and not especially fluid in the pocket—the space where both fighters are close enough to land punches. This is where Cormier has the best chance of winning the fight, and as he mentioned, he knows it.
Getting into that range is the priority for Cormier, but there's always a price to be paid for crossing through Jones' arsenal of kicks and long punches.
"I just cannot allow him to knee and kick me as I'm getting into those ranges," said Cormier. "I think with Jones, I was pressuring him recklessly. I should not just be going forward trying to get after him without an idea of what I was trying to do."
This was often apparent in their first meeting.
Cormier would press forward, and Jones would take small steps backward and to the side, cutting small angles that kept him off the fence and maintained the distance between him and Cormier. When the timing was right, Jones would plant his feet and launch a heavy kick or straight left, and then immediately dance backward on another angle to avoid the follow-up.
Over the course of the 25-minute fight, that constant stream of shots took a toll on Cormier. When pressuring, he said, "I have to be smart. You cannot be going in there, trying to go forward and pressure guys, and be taking damage and getting hurt on the way to doing it."
Minimizing Jones' opportunities to do that is a priority for Cormier, and he has made marked improvements to the quality of his pressure in his subsequent fights with Johnson and Gustafsson.
"I have definitely worked on that...being efficient and also being smarter with my pressure." Before, he said, "It was just pressure, whereas now, it's still pressure, but it's smart pressure, pressure under control. It's pressure with an idea of where I'm going."
That has played out in noticeable ways in his last two fights. He jabs more often now, using that punch to gauge the distance and cover his entries into the pocket. His footwork is sharper, and he's better at cutting off his opponent rather than following him through the space of the cage.
These simple adjustments keep him closer to his opponent. Cormier will still get hit on his way in—there's no way around this—but with less ground to cover, he'll eat fewer shots as he pressures.
Over the course of a 25-minute fight, that makes a substantial difference.
Pressure is essential to Cormier's game, not only because he's invariably giving up height (he stands 5'11") and because he wants to be in the pocket but because of the mental aspects that pressure brings. "Being able to go forward has been good, you know? I'm lucky to have that ability, to pressure guys and make them falter and wilt," he said.
Johnson's cornermen, for example, spent the last several minutes of their bout at UFC 187 last May telling their fighter not to quit.
He was tired, to be sure, but it was Cormier's relentless aggression and unwillingness to be pushed backward as much as the physical toll that eventually led to the rear-naked choke finish on the ground.
Bringing that improved pressure and the desire to make his opponent quit is essential for Cormier in the rematch with Jones. "He did a fantastic job of [wearing me down]," said Cormier.
This time around, he needs to be the one wearing Jones down. That's easier said than done, especially when Jones had so much success against Cormier in the clinch—an area where the former Olympic wrestler has always had an edge.
That was one of the few surprising things to Cormier in their first meeting. "I've always known that he was very diverse in the striking. I've always known that he mixes it up very well. I've always known that he could wrestle defensively and offensively. I've always known that.
"The only thing that surprised me was that he felt stronger. He seemed bigger whenever we would tie up. He would lean on me. He did a fantastic job of carrying my weight."
Cormier is used to making opponents feel his strength and leverage in the clinch, which inexorably tires them out, and Jones turned that dynamic around on him.
The Olympian still landed his fair share of shots in the tie-ups, throwing combinations of uppercuts and hooks that caught Jones cleanly, but in return, he ate a great many knees to the body. That damage wore on him as the fight went on.
Whether Cormier has an answer to that is hard to say. If he does, he isn't sharing it publicly.
A mixture of the blue collar and cerebral defines Cormier's game. He's all about hard work in the gym, saying of his camp, American Kickboxing Academy, "We're an old-school gym. We train and we go fight."
On some level, the idea of in-depth planning contrasts with that mentality, a comparison he made clear in his plain acknowledgment that Jones' coaches had prepared the champion thoroughly for what Cormier had to offer.
"I thought his coaches did a great job of getting a game plan together to make sure that he was ready to counter everything I was doing offensively with the wrestling and the striking," he said.
Interesting tidbit from my interview with Cormier: He's a self-taught clinch fighter. He put that game together himself, minimal coaching.
— Dr. Patrick Wyman (@Patrick_Wyman) June 30, 2016
This time, Cormier said, he's more focused on those details.
"We work hard, we have great coaches to teach us, but we never really did those little details. It's all about these little details now. You don't get to the highest levels of the sport without having the basics in order. Now, it's fine-tuning this thing, getting better at that thing.
"Once you reach a certain point, technically your improvements minimize. You don't see big jumps like you did in year one or year two when you're first learning grappling, you're first learning to kick. As you go on, the jumps start to shrink, but the details start to get more defined. The margin for error gets smaller. You can't make the big mistakes you did in fight one or two in fight 19 or 20."
Cormier's work as an analyst for Fox Sports 1 has contributed to that more detail-oriented approach. The champion worked the booth when Jones fought Saint Preux at UFC 197 in April, and that experience gave him new insight into his former and future opponent.
"I was able to watch him [Jones] objectively, because I wasn't looking at him as the guy I would fight right at that moment," Cormier said. "It allowed me to see things he is better at, and things he is not as good at. I needed to make sure I was seeing him for who he was, and not somebody that I wanted him to be."
Although it's subtle, there's a brutal honesty to that statement. Implicitly, Cormier is saying that his feelings toward Jones, and his desire to see their fight in particular ways, influenced his assessment of his opponent.
Getting out of that headspace and into one where he's forced to remove himself from the equation has made him more sanguine about the reality of their matchup.
Cormier has no illusions about how he matches up with Jones or how he wants to approach a dominant champion on top of his game. Whether his clear-eyed view of that fight and the adjustments he has made to his pressure game will be enough is impossible to know until he and Jones do battle once again.
The feud between Jones and Cormier isn't burning as hot as it was at the end of 2014, but the two fighters' dislike for each other is still palpable.
One way or another, UFC 200 will settle that score and determine, once and for all, the identity of the UFC's true light heavyweight king.
All quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.
Patrick Wyman is the Senior MMA Analyst for Bleacher Reporter and the co-host of the Heavy Hands Podcast, your source for the finer points of face-punching. He can be found on Twitter.
