After being postponed for what seems like an eternity, Frankie Edgar and Pedro Munhoz are set to scrap this weekend and the match up offers a lot of questions. Both men are coming off losses and have had their troubles: while Edgar is slowing down, Munhoz is only beginning to find his confidence on the feet but has just had it shaken in a lopsided loss to Aljamain Sterling. While Edgar has been a main event fixture for the better part of a decade now and we have examined him a dozen times before, we have not given Munhoz the same treatment. So today let us focus on Pedro Munhoz because though he is flawed he is a changing, improving fighter and those are the most interesting to study.

Pedro Munhoz’s first UFC bout was somewhat unusual. It is unlikely to hold pride of place in your mind’s collection of great and unusual fights because he took on the king of spoilers, Raphael Assuncao when the latter was on his Sisyphean climb towards a title shot. Munhoz was in on short notice—an undefeated prospect from RFA making the jump to the big leagues. He moved forward gamely and stayed active but Assuncao used his wiles and worked from both stances to cut angles, score good counters, and chase his advantages with combinations when he could see he had flustered the young upstart.

It was a well paced bout with both men working at a decent clip, it seemed like while Assuncao was landing the cleaner shots and working better in combinations, Munhoz was throwing his own shots almost as often. The strangeness came when you looked at the stats: the UFC’s stats had Assuncao outlanding Munhoz on head strikes nine to one. Fight Metric’s tallies were a bit more forgiving, but rewatching the fight you will notice that Munhoz’s work is overwhelming done in naked low kicks and he almost disregards boxing entirely. In spite of the fact that Munhoz is best known for starching the dangerous boxer, Cody Garbrandt with his hands, quality punching was largely absent from his fights until relatively recently.

For the most part Munhoz’s game through most of his UFC run seemed to be kicking the leg to draw the opponent onto his hips. Getting low kicks caught is a common problem in MMA but Munhoz often holds the hip back or, when his low kick is caught at the thigh, he will immediately turn his knee out and flick his foot out over the top of his opponent’s scooping grip.

Being able to free his leg so reliably means that Munhoz can kick near constantly. Munhoz collects his finishes off the front headlock and guillotine and kicking plays a key role in that. For an almost too perfect example of this—so perfect that your coach would have you drill it and say “of course it will never play out quite like this in a fight”—refer to Munhoz’s finish of Jerrod Sanders.

In this instance Munhoz threw a low kick, Sanders caught it and dropped in to shoot through Munhoz as he was on one leg. But Munhoz was able to free his foot early in the process, giving him the ability to sprawl on Sanders’ shot and catch the front headlock, then snagging the guillotine choke. Sadly this fight was turned into a No Contest because Munhoz failed a drug test, but no amount of exogenous testosterone is going to allow you to replicate a finish this neat.

You can see “more realistic” examples against Damian Stasiak, whom Munhoz backed up and kicked with such frequency that Stasiak would often try to grab the leg and run through on a takedown or at least attack a single leg. Sometimes Munhoz was able to free his leg and sprawl, but on other occasions Munhoz would sit down on the guillotine or begin working from the seated front headlock position.

The threat of the guillotine in the front headlock and the seated front headlock often has the same effect. It brings the opponent’s hands in which removes their means of preventing a go-behind or posting to stop a sweep. The regular front headlock double attack will be familiar to most readers: if the opponent reaches for your legs to prevent you going behind or to try to salvage a takedown, you attack his throat with the guillotine or you encircle one arm and attack a D’arce / anaconda / necktie of some nationality. If they bring their hands in tight to prevent attacking the guillotine or exposing themselves to an arm triangle, you go behind them.

From a seated front headlock or even after sliding in to finish a guillotine on his back, the fighter applying the guillotine can use the choke to keep his opponent’s hands tight and—by hip heisting his choke side leg underneath his free leg—come up to a traditional front headlock on top. This is something you used to see Marcelo Garcia do a lot in his rolling footage from a seated position, often catching the arm in a crucifix as he came up.

The paradox of becoming famous for your guillotine is that it works best as a surprise. There is no way around the fact that at the very highest levels squeezing people’s heads isn’t enough and you need to get a good bite on the neck to effectively choke someone. To return to Marcelo Garcia, he has often talked about how he uses his wrist to almost strike the opponent in the Adams apple just to get his choking hand in position under their jaw before they can curl up, hand fight, and make it tougher. The element of surprise is a great help which is why most of the good guillotines you will see are hit as the opponent turns in on a single leg from the bottom or goes after a takedown with reckless abandon. An obvious example from Munhoz’s highlight reel is that against Justin Scoggins. In true Scoggins fashion, Justin was winning the fight with slick striking, before tripping over himself and in scrambling to get up from the bottom as fast as possible he got choked almost immediately.

In fact you will notice that Munhoz isn’t that bothered about forcing his opponent flat a lot of the time. If he knocks his man down, Munhoz will put one foot into their guard and encourage them to come up, or even try to jump through their guard while wrapping the head. This is because the opportunity for the guillotine just isn’t there when the opponent is flat against the floor. After knocking Cody Garbrandt down, Munhoz kept trying to wrap the head and jump over Garbrandt’s guard. Each time he ended up on top of Brett Johns, Munhoz would threaten to begin passing, then offer Johns an opportunity to come up on a leg. Sometimes this meant using Marcelo Garcia’s back step on the leg to encourage Johns to turn into him, and other times it meant beginning a good underhook pass, then punching Johns for no reason other than to give up the underhook and convince Johns it was a good idea to come up.

You will occasionally see a very slick set up like the one Munhoz hit against Russel Doane, where Munhoz was in the process of taking the back and changed direction to an arm-across guillotine from standing but those tend to be the exception. For the most part the guillotine relies on the opponent taking an aggressive action and opening himself up.

However, if a fighter has had any degree of success with his guillotine in MMA he will probably also have attacked plenty of guillotines that he just hasn’t been able to finish and even for specialists the guillotine isn’t the kind of sure thing that fans often believe it to be. Yet a reputation for front headlock excellence also serves as a form of takedown defence in its own right. This is where this weekend’s match up between Munhoz and Frankie Edgar becomes intriguing.

Learning to Bang

If ever there were a fighter who could use a psychologist, it is Pedro Munhoz. That or his corner need to begin punching him in the face during Bruce Buffer’s introductions because a bit of confidence in his ability to take a shot and throw one back makes the difference between an awkward Munhoz kicking performance and an effective fight. Munhoz can hit decently—to that Cody Garbrandt and John Dodson can attest—but for quite a while he would refuse to. It was “kick the thigh, limp leg out, kick the thigh, limp leg out” and it resulted in bad fights if the opponent could actually strike and didn’t want to dive on the advertised single leg. Against Dodson especially, Munhoz was largely useless as he came forward kicking and got punched in the face for his trouble. Finally he seemed to realize that getting hit by Dodson wasn’t so bad and began throwing back. It was sloppy but he produced a much more evenly contested fight in the later going.

Moving to American Top Team seemed to help Munhoz as he traded the traditional low kick for the low-low kick that is an American Top Team staple and has since changed the face of the sport. Not only was the kick more debilitating, it could be thrown naked from range with less risk of a return punch up the bracket. A couple of fights back, Munhoz took Brett Johns apart with the low-low kick and the front kick to the body, but the low-low kick was also crucial in his most high profile victory against Garbrandt.

Munhoz’s gameplan against Garbrandt was terrific. Going against the division’s quickest and hardest puncher seemed to put the right kind of fear into Munhoz and he fought perfectly. Rather than get bedazzled looking at Garbrandt’s hands, Munhoz kept an exaggerated range and worked to counter Garbrandt’s closing step. In this regard it was a little similar to Garbrandt’s own Absolute Masterclass against Dominick Cruz. Munhoz would establish a long range, Garbrandt would rush in to close, and Munhoz would meet him with an intercepting counter. Sometimes with a low-low kick as he put weight onto the lead foot.

But also with a great dip and overhand counter that clubbed Garbrandt across the neck. Before Munhoz found confidence in his striking his style was always to walk forward and apply pressure, even when he didn’t really have the weapons to be a threat. With the strides he has made under American Top Team, Munhoz looked like a force against Brett Johns and Bryan Caraway before the Garbrandt fight, but after breaking through to the fanbase with a huge KO over a former champion, Munhoz fell short against Aljamain Sterling.

Sterling is on the run of his life right now and so losing to him is hardly an embarrassment. Yet the flaws Sterling exploited—Munhoz’s slow, shuffling footwork and resorting to cover-ups as his go-to defensive moves—existed when he came into the UFC. Raphael Assuncao spoke candidly about them before he fought Munhoz and said that his intention was to take advantage of Munhoz’s tendency to shell up. Covering up and moving forward is fine, if you can capitalize on where your shell gets you, but Munhoz often cannot and the straight kicks and punches of Sterling, with a few nice elbows thrown in, kept him from opening up effectively even when he was close enough to try. One of the most irritating things about watching Munhoz pressure forward and cover up is that he fights as though he should have a great left hook—that Vicente Luque kind of left hook, where you take a punch or kick on your guard and immediately turn the guy’s head around—but he just does not.

The reason that the Frankie Edgar match up is so compelling is that Edgar could have the tools to pick away at Munhoz and dance around him just as Sterling did. But on the other side of that, Edgar’s striking works so well because the level changes and takedown attempts are a constant threat. One aspect of his game builds off the other and his “wrestle-boxing” is greater than the sum of its parts. When Edgar hasn’t been able to work his takedowns effectively—as against Aldo, Holloway and Ortega—he has quickly looked out of sorts, if not downright worried about striking. Where Aldo and Holloway had great takedown defence and fought Edgar off each time he tried, Ortega spooked him by threatening a guillotine on Edgar’s first level change. Ortega is not a great wrestler but his front headlock work is excellent. Where Aldo and Holloway worked their way out of Edgar’s takedowns and he tried again and again, Ortega seemed to convince Edgar that the level change was more trouble than it was worth and Edgar soon got knocked out trying to kickbox with Ortega. So while it appears Edgar has all the tools necessary to take advantage of Munhoz’s shortcomings, Munhoz’s few areas of expertise might well leave a few jaws agape if he can scare Edgar off the level change early.