#3 Cain Velasquez vs. Junior Dos Santos – UFC 166 – 10/19/13
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Alright, so this one might prove to be premature given JDS is currently scheduled to fight for the UFC Heavyweight title again in April. Personally, though I don’t think he’ll win, and I’d argue he hasn’t been the same since this fight.
UFC 166 was the third meeting between Velasquez and Dos Santos; the two had split their previous pair of fights, with JDS knocking Cain out in November 2011 to win the HW title from him and then Cain taking the title back via decision in December 2012.
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One more fight for both, and it was time to settle the trilogy.
Despite Dos Santos knocking out Mark Hunt after the first loss to Cain, most observers gave the champion a big advantage. After all, while Dos Santos had knocked him out within two minutes, Cain had put a tremendous beating on him over five rounds in the second fight, using his clinch work and takedowns to set up thudding punches while forcing JDS into the fence.
Dos Santos actually tagged Velasquez with a punch in the opening seconds of the fight, but unfortunately for him, it was about the most success he’d see. From there, the fight was essentially a repeat of the second meeting, as Velasquez clinched JDS, forced him into the cage, roughed him up with dirty boxing and takedowns, and generally beat him up.
The third round was perhaps the most brutal, as Cain dropped JDS with a right hand and then appeared to knock him in and out of consciousness. How referee Herb Dean didn’t stop the fight I’ll never know.
With each round that went by, Dos Santos was looking physically worse, like a caricature of Frankenstein’s monster.
Eventually, the end came in the fifth round. A hurt Dos Santos attempted a guillotine, and when Cain escaped, slamming JDS’ head into the ground, the Brazilian had no more to give and the fight was stopped.
It would be more than a year before we’d see JDS in action again and although his return fight was a stone cold classic – one of my favourite fights of 2014 – his decision win over Stipe Miocic was seen as bogus by most analysts, as outside of a knockdown in the third round, the fight was largely dominated by Miocic using the same gameplan that Cain had done – walk JDS down, back him into the cage and rough him up.
Once again JDS came away looking like he’d been in a car wreck, and once again it’d be a year before we saw him again. This time it was against longtime rival Alistair Overeem and JDS looked even worse, seemingly tentative and gun shy and it was no shock when Overeem knocked him out with a second-round left hook.
Since then he’s returned to beat Ben Rothwell via unanimous decision, but while he looked good in that fight, it still didn’t feel like he was the Dos Santos of old, the man who ran through the division before the second Velasquez fight.
It’s that third fight that I think had the most detriment to JDS’s career, though – not only did Cain practically write the blueprint to beat the Brazilian, he also altered his career for the worse. In my eyes, JDS has never been the same.
