#3 Dominick Cruz vs TJ Dillashaw
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Dominick Cruz stands, peerless, at the cutting edge of evolution in MMA today.
Mentally, no other fighter has a grasp of the nuances of the fight game like he does, and his trash talk – disguised beneath a veneer of honey-toned rhetoric – breaks down his opponents without them even being aware of it.
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Stylistically, he’s so far ahead of the curve with his you-miss-I-hit approach that even a lengthy hiatus of 3-odd years, punctuated by a short and solitary appearance against Takeya Mizugaki, didn’t present enough time for his competitors to close the gap.
Arguably, the closest anyone has come to defeating him is TJ Dillashaw – whose destruction of then longtime division king Renan Barao had the analysts waxing lyrical that he was at the forefront of the ‘next-gen’ fighters in the UFC.
A returning Cruz however, edged past him in a technically robust encounter, proving that he hasn’t missed a step – literally too – in his absence. Soon after that, he settled the score with perennial adversary Urijah Faber by outclassing him in a dominant performance at UFC 199.
Just when it seemed like he had exorcised the haunt of a Team Alpha Male soldier gunning for his belt, up stepped the hard-hitting and “marketable” Cody Garbrandt to fill in the blanks. While they are slated to tango, however, at UFC 207, Garbrandt hasn’t quite earned the title shot by leaving behind a wake of contenders as much by checking all the boxes of modern day marketability.
Although assuming that Cruz sees off the latest pitstop in his detour of pursuing sellable fights, at some point – for the health of the Bantamweight division – there has to be a confluence between his path and that of TJ Dillashaw once again.
Their first fight was decided by the finest of margins and if nothing else, the requirement of a clearer outcome begs the second one.
