For the bulk of his UFC career, Kamaru Usman was a grinding wrestler, who outside of a knockout win over Sérgio Moraes, had never given his opponents much reason to worry about his skills on the feet. That changed over the course of his five-fight reign as the UFC welterweight champion, during which time he stopped Colby Covington, Gilbert Burns and Jorge Masvidal with his striking. His win over Masvidal—actually his second after a suffocating decision triumph in 2020—was particularly violent, and it earned him a ton of respect as a striker.
Despite that, Edwards is still the better fighter on the feet, and that's not really surprising. While Usman got his start in combat sports as a wrestler and had to learn to kick and punch from there, the Brit's first combat sport was MMA. Like most fighters from the United Kingdom, where college wrestling isn't as prominent, he's always favored striking over grappling.
The numbers, interestingly, do not reflect this. Usman has the better knockout rate (45 percent to 37). He also lands substantially more significant strikes per minute (4.55 to 2.59), and hits his target at a slightly better rate (53 to 50).
Yet all this really indicates that the two fighters have different approaches to striking. Usman uses his striking to overwhelm his foes and as a means of blinding them to his takedown attempts. Edwards is more of a trap-setter who hangs back to get reads on his foe rather than throwing with abandon.
This was perfectly exemplified by their second fight.
Edwards threw quite a bit less than Usman, but by the waning moments of the fifth-round, when he was down on the scorecards and less than a minute away from a decision loss, he knew that the Nigerian-American had a bad habit of ducking slightly to avoid strikes and how that habit could be countered. Then came the kick.
It was a brilliant display of strategy under pressure, and an excellent reminder of the fact that, in the striking phases of MMA—and in sports like kickboxing and Muay Thai—less is sometimes more.
Edge: Edwards
