Fight IQ Corner
A rundown of the moves and concepts that keep coming up when we write up a card, for anyone new to the scene. This page is written by fans watching tape, not by coaches or doctors — it’s here to help you follow along with the Events write-ups, not to teach you how to throw or defend any of this yourself. If you want to actually learn this stuff, go find one of the gyms on the Links page and ask a real instructor.
The Sprawl
When a fighter shoots in low for a takedown, the sprawl is the defence: kick both legs back out of range, drop the hips flat onto the attacker’s shoulders, and use your weight to flatten them out along the floor rather than letting them finish the drive to your legs. Done well it turns a takedown attempt into bad news for whoever shot it — you end up on top, they end up staring at the canvas. “Big” Joe Turner rarely needs it since he’s usually the one shooting, but watch what “Iron” Mike Delgado does with his hips against a wrestler and you’re watching a sprawl in real time.
Clinch Control
Clinch fighting is the tie-up: two fighters chest-to-chest, fighting over an underhook or a grip behind the neck, trying to out-position each other before anything gets thrown or attempted. Whoever wins the clinch usually decides what happens next — a knee, a takedown, or simply pinning the other fighter against the fence and grinding until the referee has seen enough. Delgado’s FCS 6 win over Danny Okafor was won almost entirely in the clinch: two rounds of fence pressure before the stoppage, without ever needing to finish a big shot.
Guard
“Guard” means fighting from your back with your legs wrapped around the other fighter — and in this sport it’s a real position, not just a bad spot to be in. A fighter with a strong guard can control distance, set up sweeps to reverse the position entirely, or go straight for a submission from underneath. Some fighters will even pull guard on purpose rather than trade on the feet, which looks strange the first time you see it and makes total sense once you’ve watched “Snakebite” Whitfield do it to someone twice his size.
Submissions
A submission ends the fight when a fighter taps out rather than let a hold finish doing damage — chokes cut off blood or air, joint locks threaten to hyperextend an arm or a leg. The three you’ll see written up most on this site are the rear naked choke (from behind the neck, the finish Whitfield used on Rocco Salerno at FCS 6), the guillotine (a choke applied from the front, usually off a stuffed takedown, which is how Whitfield beat Marcus Boone at FCS 5), and the armbar (isolating and extending the elbow, which is how Boone finally got his first win over Tommy Briggs at FCS 6). None of these are things to try on a friend in the backyard — every fighter on this roster has years of mat time behind the version they use.
Ground-and-Pound
Once a fight hits the floor, ground-and-pound is exactly what it sounds like: using a dominant position — usually full mount or side control — to land strikes rather than hunt for a submission. It’s a wrestler’s tool as much as a striker’s, since the hard part isn’t the punching, it’s getting on top and staying there. Most of the “TKO (strikes)” results on the Events page — Joe Turner over Tommy Briggs at FCS 4, Turner over Eddie Chen at FCS 6 — came from exactly this: top position, and a referee deciding the fighter underneath wasn’t getting back up.