Fall From Grace: Renan Barao

The ten-year theory

So what exactly caused the downfall of Renan Barao? It’s an odd one in that there didn’t seem to be any indications that it was about to happen prior to the first Dillashaw fight; Barao looked unstoppable until suddenly he wasn’t. And it can’t purely be that Dillashaw was so much better and just had the perfect style to beat him. That doesn’t explain the subsequent showings.

One theory I’ve come up with has to do with his time in MMA. Although Barao’s only 30 he has been fighting professionally since 2005, and he’s been at the top of the game since 2010. While often people point to advanced age as the point in which a fighter begins to slide, personally I’m not sure that I agree.

Take Randy Couture for instance – people marvelled when he was able to topple Tito Ortiz in 2004, as Randy was 40 years old at the time. However, at that point, he’d only been fighting professionally for seven years. Barao’s countryman Francisco Trinaldo is another example – at age 38 his recent seven-fight win streak seemed jaw-dropping – but Trinaldo has been fighting for ten years and only has 26 fights on his record.

Jordan Mein, on the other hand, is just 27. He’s recently returned from retirement but realistically, he’s looked past his best for a while now. He’s been fighting for eleven years and has a record of 29-11, so 40 professional fights. While he’s not as old chronologically as Trinaldo – or Couture when he was accomplishing miracles – in terms of fighting age he’s much further down the line.

Barao would fall into the same category as Mein. He’s relatively young in age, but in a fight sense, he’s much, much older. The first Dillashaw fight was his 34^th and he’d already been in the game nine years at that point.

The only time Barao was knocked out prior to his UFC career was by an illegal soccer kick

Ten years – give or take a little – seems to be the general timeframe and after that, most fighters begin to slide. If you fight with a particularly reckless style or train with a camp well-known for hard sparring, then that timeframe can be shortened even further.

Which leads me onto my next point...

Damage counts

While his gaudy record and amazing winning streak meant that at his peak, Barao was seen almost as invincible, the reality is that he was never a fighter who came away from his wins unscathed. While his two wins over Faber and his win over Jorgensen were largely one-sided affairs, the rest of his UFC victories were not.

Take the Pickett fight for example. While Barao came out on top eventually, that fight was a war. On a rewatch, in fact, you could make an argument that it was the strength of Barao’s chin that allowed him to win rather than anything else. Both men took sledgehammer blows – it was merely Pickett’s chin that cracked first and set up the fight-ending choke.

Likewise, the McDonald fight – Barao was badly hurt in a trade with ‘Mayday’ and it was only his veteran wiles that allowed him to stay calm under fire and eventually outwork his younger challenger. And while Eddie Wineland never had Barao truly hurt, he won the first round of their fight using cleaner striking.

The point I’m making is this – if Barao was willing to trade off with insanely heavy hitters like Pickett, McDonald and Wineland, could we be missing a big piece of the puzzle that is his downfall? While Chael Sonnen made the point that Barao’s win streak was built off the back of wins over largely unknowns, very little footage exists of those fights.

Could it be that despite fighting unknowns, Barao was still trading strikes and taking damage from them, even in victory? Judging by his largely reckless style in his early UFC career, I feel that the chance is pretty high that it was the case.

As the highlight shows, Barao was never afraid to throw down

Throw in the fact that Barao has trained for his whole career with Nova Uniao – a camp chock-full of top fighters, famous for hard sparring between teammates – and it could be that he’s simply taken a career’s worth of damage and can’t really take any more.

While moving up in weight may have helped him somewhat in a sense that he no longer needs to make a big weight cut, it may well be a bit of a smokescreen. After all, prior to the UFC 177 debacle, Barao had never missed weight, not even when he was fighting in foreign territory such as England.