Huerta-Mayweather

I’d have to say that Huerta should win a proposed MMA match between him and Mayweather. The reason would be the same reason that boxers faired horribly in the first UFCs; they have a crucial weakness: they know nothing about ground fighting.
Now I assume Mayweather would have a good amount of MMA training before accepting the fight. But unless he’s a freak of nature who can acquire great takedown defense exponentially faster than other fighters he should lose. I think the boxing community and maybe the public at large drastically underestimates who hard it is to develop great TDD (takedown defense). It generally requires tremendous wrestling skills, balance, flexibility, and overall athleticism. Seeing fighters like Georges St. Pierre, BJ Penn, and Chuck Liddell sprawl out of takedown attempts fluidly and with seeming ease can make someone forget that ability takes YEARS to develop, and that even the best weren’t nearly as good at it when they first started training. And that’s the level Mayweather should be at, having never practiced it in his life.
So Huerta should be able to take him down and once there, there are NO good scenarios for Mayweather. Learning how to successfully fend off and initiate attack from your back may be even harder to learn than TDD. Again Mayweather, having never trained that before, should be a fish out of water. If he survived more than a few minutes on his back I’d be surprised. He should be either a submission or TKO waiting to happen; one simply doesn’t learn the intricacies of how to develop a good position, use leverage, shift your opponent’s body weight, sweep your opponent, use his aggressiveness against him, know what holds to look out for, and gain and secure those holds, by training them for a bit. Not when you’re competing against someone who’s been training in them for years.
Taking these things into consideration the fight becomes a no-brainer; there’s little doubt that Huerta would be able to get Mayweather to the ground, and even less doubt about how Mayweather would fare once he was there.
But there is another aspect, one which the average sports fan is probably well aware of. Mayweather is a PHENOMENAL boxer. In standup, this fight should be to his advantage. That advantage may not be as big as most people would think, because he would have to defend against kicks, elbows, and knees also, as in a Muay-Thai clinch, a position which may neutralize his punching and expose him to the aforementioned strikes he’s not familiar with.
Mayweather’s main shot in this fight is to hurt Huerta with punches, and then finish him off before he’s able to recover. In all other aspects of this fight his amazing boxing skills do him little, if any good. And he could do just that. But MMA fights have shown that the chances of that are pretty rare. Huerta can take a good shot, and Mayweather is far from being a one punch knockout artist. Mayweather would have to hurt him and then quickly overwhelm him, while paying attention to not allow Huerta to rescue himself by grabbing a hold of him for a clinch. This is possible, but again, it’s unlikely. Even the quickest, most fluid boxers in history, guys with tremendous reflexes (think Ali in his prime) routinely got in clinches. The difference is, in MMA, your opponent can slam you to the ground and continue the battle there after this happens. Now I’m sure if a prime Ali was fighting in MMA and knew this he’d avoid clinches more “vigorously” than he had while boxing. But sooner or later it would be bound to happen. It’s just very hard to go an entire fight without your opponent getting close enough to take a hold of you. So I guess the real question is would ANY boxer beat a top-level MMA fighter in an MMA fight. By now, my answer probably rings familiar. It’s possible…but unlikely.

Article Source: http://MMAWriters.com

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