Rampage: Motive for Retirement
By Josh Stein on Oct 08, 2009
While it seems like something that could be explained at great length, the number sort of speaks for itself at this point: 0-4.
Team Rampage has gone 0-4 and lost its first two picks already. But that’s not a surprise. Rampage went 1-3 in his first four when he coached against Forrest Griffin (and went 2-6 in the first round, overall). What’s surprising, and disappointing, is Rampage’s failure as a coach. The fact that Demico was sitting in the locker room before his fight, wondering where his coaches were, not warming up, clearly in a bad place psychologically (just listening to his talk before the fight made that clear), demonstrates clear ineptitude on the part of Rampage and his entire coaching staff.
Rampage isn’t known for training with legendary camps. The Wolfslair is a good camp, but the reality is, they’re not Jackson’s Submission Fighting or Xtreme Couture or American Top Team. And it’s worth noting that Rampage isn’t one of the instructors there. Still, the opening of this series has been embarrassing for Rampage, and it really begs the question: did Rampage retire to preempt this from becoming an embarrassing part of the hype going into the fight with Rashad?I’ll have a recap of the last episode and some more thoughts on Rampage’s coaching failure later, but this is really a separate piece of speculation. Feel free to post a comment with thoughts.
Filed Under: MMA
None of the fighters who have appeared on TUF are coaches, for the most part they’re sparring partners at best. Maybe with the exception of Randy but who knows how much of it is hype and not hype. I don’t really think the fighters will be worrying so much that their team lost or won the Ultimate Fighter.
I don’t think it comes as a great surprise that Rampage is not a great coach. I knew that before he coached against Forrest Griffin.
Another note, I don’t see how people are comparing how effective a training camp can be. Is that something that you can really guage? Fedor doesn’t traing with the famous Militech Training System but Tim Sylvia does. Brock Lesnar is not affiliated with any big name training camp. While some fighters have experienced dramatic changes in their styles within some camps, others have not. Some camps are particularly famous because of a 1 or 2 guys working out of the camp.
I’m noticing that fans are now citing their training camps as advantage in skill. Example: I often heard fans cite Rashad Evans having Greg Jackson, the master-planner, as an advantage against Lyoto Machida. That just doesn’t make any sense because it really reflects poorly on what Machida does to prepare and train for a fight.
Training camps are important, Vee, if for no other reason than it helps develop a coherent gameplan and hone the skills that a fighter is going to use in executing that gameplan.
It’s not 100% effective, but there have been a lot of instances where a fighter has brought a strange gameplan out of training camp that has been incredibly effective.
I think people tend to underestimate the work ethic of fighters and that was one of the things that I talked about with the guys leading up to Carano vs. Cyborg. Gina may train at Xtreme Couture, but if you’re not in the gym taking advantage of those coaches all the time then it doesn’t matter.