Edwards-Muhammad 2: when laser focus meets lazy fuck-up

Long overdue but not obsolete, my breakdown of the cooperative effort that saw Belal Muhammad take Leon Edwards' UFC title.

How often do you get a massive upset that feels completely predictable in hindsight? That was what happened at UFC 304, where Belal Muhammad wrested the welterweight title from defending champ Leon Edwards. 

Muhammad was given long odds to win, thanks in large part to the five minutes Edwards spent beating him up in their first meeting back in 2021, before an inadvertent eyepoke aborted the fight early in round two. It was by no means a definitive result: Muhammad is known as a consistent, five-round fighter, one who simply ups his intensity if he feels himself falling behind–whereas Leon Edwards… is Leon Edwards. Still, those five minutes put Edwards in the catbird seat coming into the rematch, and Muhammad on the ground beneath him with everything left to prove. 

Boy did he prove it, in the end. Still, it’s difficult not to see this particular fight as a two-man job, a sort of conspiracy between Belal Muhammad’s virtues and Leon Edwards’ vices. 

This is why I say the fight feels predictable in hindsight. Belal Muhammad is known as a diligent gameplanner, a fighter who not only prepares for his opponents but sticks doggedly to whatever gameplan he has cooked up. Leon Edwards, on the other hand, is a choke artist—and I’m not talking about his submission game. He loses control of his fights with such regularity that, frankly, the fact that he hadn’t actually lost a bout in nearly nine years prior to UFC 304 should be counted as a minor miracle. 

So we’ll be taking a two-sided approach to all of the examples we look at in this piece. Because while I can’t help but be impressed with Belal Muhammad’s clinical, strategic decision-making, I also can’t help but ask… what the hell was Leon Edwards thinking?

Punishing shortcuts

The cornerstone of Belal Muhammad’s gameplan was pressure. He and his team recognized that Leon Edwards, dangerous striker though he is, does not enjoy fighting in the pocket; that, in fact, he hates it. And so the strategy was to simply exist in that range as early and as often as possible: make Leon Edwards work to get rid of him. 

But Leon Edwards is not merely uncomfortable in the pocket; he is critically underskilled there. I have written before about the chicken-and-egg relationship between Edwards’ obvious discomfort in middle distance and the piecemeal boxing technique which renders that discomfort permanent. The dichotomy was on full display last weekend, as Edwards was immediately and repeatedly confronted by an opponent who simply refused to be scared out of exchanging distance. 

First, take a look at Belal’s foot placement in this sequence—and let this be the last time you buy into the whole “outside foot position is the only way to beat a southpaw” nonsense. Contrary to received wisdom, Muhammad sought the inside foot position throughout this fight, which accomplished two things: 1) It gave his jab a clean line down the middle, and 2) it allowed him to get closer and stay closer to Edwards than if he had battled for the outside angle or kept his lead foot in opposition to Leon’s. Both factors increased the amount of pressure Muhammad was able to apply. 

How Edwards responds to this pressure says everything about his abilities as a pocket fighter. Feeling the fence creeping up behind him, he tries to circle out—but he does a very poor job of it. The correct move would be to pivot around the lead foot, maintaining his lead hand as a barrier between Muhammad and his own center line. Instead, he steps back into a square stance and tries to sidle away along the fence, fully exposing his center and abandoning any stake to the space between himself and his opponent.