The UFC’s featherweight division is a land of plenty in which it seems no bad match up can be made. On card after card it is the one hundred and forty-five pounders that consistently deliver. From the established names like Zabit Magomedsharipov and Max Holloway down to the men on the step below who haven’t quite “arrived” yet. Shane Burgos is one of those fan favourites in waiting and everyone who has seen him fight agrees that he owns a considerable amount of potential.

For a start, Burgos is a pressure cooker who builds his game on offensive counter punching. That in itself is almost a guarantee of an entertaining style. Anyone tuning in for a night of fights wants to see overhands and left hooks smacking people upside the head and Burgos gets to work on that from the first minute of the first round to the last seconds of the last one. There is no mucking around and showing “too much respect” in a Burgos fight.

Perhaps our most detailed look at offensive counter punching came in a Fightland article called Mike Tyson: The Panic, the Slip, and the Counter. The title sums up the entire process of offensive counter punching: the fighter moves forward and applies pressure until the opponent lashes out—at which point he slides his head to the inside or outside of the blow and throws back in combination.

A fighter could perhaps move forward behind a dipping jab and call it aggressive counter fighting, but generally offensive counter punching thrives by seeking out what Edwin Haislet called the Inside Position.

If you want to get away from punches and make your opponent’s job harder—slip to the elbow side and put yourself as far away from his other hand as possible. If you want to get in and mix it up, slip to the inside of your opponent’s straight punches and collapse the space that he was seeking to preserve with his linear blows. The two main counter punches that thrive off the inside slip are the cross counter—across the top of the opponent’s jab—and the left hook, returning to bladed from a squared up slipping position.

Shane Burgos’ A-game makes him something exotic in mixed martial arts. Casual fight fans want to see people knocked out with left hooks and overhand rights—yet this is a sport fought from karate distance, with the complication of wrestling takedowns if you get too close. By looming large in front of his opponent and drawing out straight punches over and over, Burgos puts himself in position to score good counter punches and solid connections round after round.

Through his first three UFC bouts, Burgos walked down and chewed up Tiago Trator, Charles Rosa and Godofredo Pepey. Then he met Calvin Kattar and it stopped working. The reason for that parallels Mike Tyson’s worst performances and what was written in the Tyson article at Fightland. For the offensive counter puncher the jab decides the fight. If you can get the timing on the jab you can find your openings and pick a man apart every time he starts to hit. Every exchange gets worse for your opponent because the jab is supposed to be the tool to keep you off him. But if you cannot get the timing on your opponent’s jab, if your slips are mistimed and you’re falling for feints, you get stuck on the end of it and swing at air, never able to get to the inside position.

One of the reasons that Kattar’s jab gave Burgos so much trouble was that it came almost entirely from the arm. Gene Tunney wrote that he beat Dempsey because he didn’t put his hips into his punches and his straight hitting was done entirely from the arm. A great many fighters learn to use their hips and shoulders and to put their shoulder in before they begin extending their jab, giving a recognizable trigger to the counter puncher. Burgos couldn’t time Kattar’s jab because Kattar’s jab was an arm punch in the strictest sense, almost nothing moved apart from his elbow.

Calling an Audible

But where this writer thought of Burgos as a hard nosed pressure fighter, a review of his bouts revealed a surprisingly adaptable striker. Charles Rosa’s team picked up on Burgos’ heavy lead leg and set about circling and low kicking: the same sort of strategy Mairbek Taisumov found success with in the early going against Diego Ferreira.

Burgos changed things up by using push kicks to drive Rosa off his base when he kicked and force him towards the cage. Burgos also began to park up just on the end of Rosa’s kick instead of trying to walk through it, then he withdrew his leg on the cue and walked in through its wake. He also realised that by throwing low kicks of his own he could encourage the response and better control when Rosa threw the low kicks. He didn’t become a completely different fighter but he made the adaptations to better impose his existing style upon Rosa.

Godofredo Pepey’s wild, spasmodic swinging was giving Burgos pause for thought, and good intercepting knees were preventing Burgos from entering as confidently as he often does. So Burgos began to shoulder fake his entries. He squared his hips and instead shot his cuff and skewered Pepey on the end of long, stiff jabs. It was a weapon that Burgos showed so rarely that this writer figured he didn’t have much of a jab, yet the moment he thought that was the right way to proceed he brought it to the forefront.

Calvin Kattar’s jab had Burgos’ eyes red and weepy within the opening minute and Burgos would go on to get knocked out in the third round, but small changes clawed him back into the fight in the first and second rounds. Unable to reliably read Kattar’s jab, Burgos got to work more effectively on the lead—putting Kattar on the back foot for periods instead of fighting reactively. Furthermore, when Kattar scored stiff jabs, Burgos returned with three and four punch flurries—something you so seldom see in MMA—and was able to close on Kattar and score good body shots in this way. Another smart adjustment was focusing on low kicks to try and cut down Kattar’s mobility and thereby slow his jab-and-move antics. Burgos didn’t put as much into the last of these tactics as he perhaps could have but Renato Moicano would show what an issue they were for Kattar shortly afterwards.

Most recently against Cub Swanson, Burgos began timing a right uppercut as Swanson lunged in, and even began to shift back into a southpaw stance to do so—going to the well with this counter time and time again throughout the fight and even setting it up by kicking and retreating into the opposite stance. As a gigantic featherweight who spends his time trying to force his way inside, it was odd but satisfying to watch Burgos work more at range and drawing his shorter opponent forward.

Gomi 2.0

While scoring cross counters on the entry and following up with the left hook is a big part of Burgos’ game, a lot of his best hitting is done to the body. It is very much old hat for MMA writers to gripe about how almost no one is using body work as much as they should in MMA, but even after years of moaning it is still true. Much of Burgos’ success comes from using his size and presence to pressure opponents, hitting their body throughout, and shucking off or sprawling on takedown attempts. Combined with solid conditioning this means that the third round of a Burgos fight is almost always when you get to see him at his best.

One of the issues with going forward and throwing hands is that you can leave yourself exposed for the short level change of a reactive double leg, or simply a duck into the clinch. By often fighting squared up to the opponent and with his head forward of his hips, Burgos seems to give himself something of an advantage on the level change. With a short motion he can downblock or sprawl completely—as opposed to having to get his lead hip back from a long, bladed stance. Burgos’ fights with Pepey and Trator are terrific examples of this and they cannot help but conjure an image of the great Takanori Gomi’s run through the PRIDE lightweight grand prix: hitting bodies, walking forwards, and no-selling takedown attempts as he did so.

One of Burgos’ best blows is a simple sneaker right hand off the cross face. Jamming a clinching opponent with a forearm check on the lead side of the neck, Burgos will uncork his right straight and scramble their brain.

In addition to the strength advantage he seems to have by cutting a huge amount of weight to make featherweight, Burgos does some pretty interesting stuff on the defensive end of a good shot. Burgos will immediately sprint to put his head on the fence and use the kind of Sakuraba position defence we have seen become so prominent in the last few years. He keeps the cage pressed to one side of him so that his opponent cannot insert a hook for back control, and tries to separate the wrist in order to break free. Burgos will also immediately begin talking to the referee and doing the “this guy’s just stalling” mime to the crowd.

One wrinkle that I do not believe I have seen before is how Burgos will lean forward onto his hands and then use his fence side leg to hook on his opponent’ inside hip. This stifles his opponent’s ability to land knees into the hamstrings, or sneak around the side and knee Burgos in the head. In fact, as a bumper between his opponent’s hips and his own it seems to complicate matters for them all around. It is very similar to the “turtle hook” that Leo Vieira and Robson Moura liked to use—where turning back towards the opponent would pull them into guard. Makwan Amirkhani almost gave himself a hernia trying to hoist Burgos into the air from this position and Burgos simply rolled back up to his feet before Amirkhani could control him.

It should be clear why many in MMA see so much potential in Shane Burgos, but with a fight against Josh Emmett booked for this weekend Burgos might be in with his stiffest test since Kattar. As much as Burgos slips more punches than most fighters in MMA, he also puts himself in position to do so and is almost always offering himself up as a target. That’s the thing with offensive counter fighting—to get the opponent to open up you have to put yourself in position where he can legitimately hit you.

Burgos has been clipped by plenty of good shots in his UFC run and while his style is set up to punish the most fundamental punch of boxing, he tends to get dinged with big right hands. Pepey had great success flicking a jab out just enough to follow with a swinging, connect-with-the-wrist style overhand. A few of Burgos’ opponents have realized that his centreline and body are more exposed due to his stance and pressure, and surprisingly enough his first three UFC opponents all found repeated success by timing him with turning kicks to the body.

However, timing a man with a turning side kick while coming in is a tricky job and all three—Trator, Rosa and Pepey—also found themselves badly out-angled when Burgos side stepped their kick.

A technique which might be more helpful in dealing with Burgos is the Kyokushin / knockdown karate style back kick. Rather than turning through on a side kick, the fighter throws a kick with his heel almost drawn in to his buttocks, targeting the opponent’s liver. In Kyokushin this is performed with a jump instead of a pivot around the standing leg.

More orthodox body strikes along the centre line would likely also be successful against Burgos and keep his opponent safer. The jab and right straight to the body being the most obvious—with due respect given to the counter left hook that would invariably come back in answer.

Emmett is often a very low output fighter who circles the cage for rounds at a time, then with a quick jab-and-overhand out of either stance he’ll put his opponent’s lights out. Getting fighters walking onto him and disregarding their defence seems to be a large part of his success, which could be a big issue given that Burgos already offers himself up on a platter. A great example of using the back kick as an intercepting weapon from Pettis vs Melendez.

Most concerning against Emmett is that a catch and pitch right hand is his speciality. He dropped Jeremy Stephens and wobbled Ricardo Lamas and Mirsad Bektic with simple a simple lead forearm catch to right straight return. Emmett is essentially the Team Alpha Male striker updated to 2020—he moves a lot, he throws quick, sprinting flurries, and he often shifts as he does so. One of the issues for Burgos here is that he also hasn’t shown the best ring cutting—his pressure fighting has largely been just always returning once the opponent circles off. Emmett has done a good job of limiting exchanges in the past with his lateral movement and jogs around the cage, Burgos should be looking to step across and cut the cage properly in this one.

Clearly, there is a lot to like about Shane Burgos and he has a good mind for fighting. While he has shown himself capable of adapting on the fly to better serve his A game, the concern in this fight is that it might be existing issues with his A-game itself that get him into trouble.