Lerone Murphy: Defusing Another Puncher

How Murphy's crafty elbows wreak havoc on punchers, and Aaron's Pico's problem with information asymmetry.

Lerone Murphy’s clever use of elbows has stood out in his recent run, giving him an edge over more powerful punchers in otherwise dangerous situations. We talked earlier about how he used counter elbows to train Josh Emmett out of pursuing him with aggressive flurries. But his recent knockout of surging Bellator star, Aaron Pico, showed us what happens if his aggressive opponents don’t learn the lesson he taught Emmett.

While Murphy is a thoughtful, talented fighter, he has clear downsides. He’s not a big hitter, with gangly, awkward arms suited more to picking away with straight punches than throwing his weight into powerful blows. He uses clever lateral movement to avoid danger, but that only holds off a determined fighter for so long unless they can be forced to respect the counters. Emmett and Pico are both monstrous hitters who have serious advantages over Murphy in punching power, mechanics, and fluidity in the pocket. He would always need to find moments to scare them off, but throwing down with them was unlikely to end well.

But Murphy’s counter elbows have proved the perfect equalizer in two successive fights now. Faced with being overwhelmed in the pocket, his clever use of elbows allowed him to keep a tight guard and slot short, sharp strikes inside the wider blows of his opponent. His awkward rotational weight transfer ceased to be a downside, as smooth weight transfer isn’t strictly necessary to do plenty of damage with a solid hunk of bone. While not without their own risks, elbows are an excellent tool to generate threat at a range otherwise dominated by the heavy-handed.

Pico’s goal was clear from the beginning of the fight - much as he does in every fight, he wanted to crowd Murphy right away, square his hips, and rip away with some of the most violent left hooks you’ll ever see in MMA.

Pico wasn’t giving Murphy a chance to employ any of the tricky feinting or low side kicks he used to stymie Emmett. He sold out on his own offense, confident that his power and offensive tactics would be enough to fell Murphy regardless of what came back at him. Right away the onus was put on Murphy to take respect by force. Pico’s aggression inverted the typical calculus - now moving around and avoiding exchanges at any cost was the risky play against a rampaging bull, and the best way to stay safe was to show Pico that he could be hurt.

It wasn’t long before Murphy started adjusting and taking advantage of Pico’s aggression.

Pico stormed forward, trying to end the fight with two massive hooks to the body, but Murphy ate them and pitched an elbow right back. He wound up on his back in the exchange after pulling a guillotine, but the elbow forced Pico to momentarily give up on finishing him and duck in on his hips, and he was soon back to his feet.

Note the position Pico found himself in right before the elbow landed. Feet square, ready to rip his weight into violent hooks, head close to Murphy’s with just enough space to get off a body blow, and hands low, attacking the body. In order to maximize his weight transfer into his left hook, Pico puts himself in a very vulnerable position in terms of his stance and hand position, but the distance is usually his saving grace. He’s too close to ward off with a clean punch, and Murphy’s awkward swings would just give Pico more room to make mincemeat of his ribs. But Pico is a sitting duck for the elbow that most fighters wouldn’t think to throw.

The distance and trajectory of elbows makes them an especially potent counter to body punches. One of the main complaints about boxing in MMA has long been the reticence of MMA fighters to hit the body, but recent generations have shored that up completely to the point where it seems like every striking-based prospect invests a great deal in body work. So I’ve moved onto a new pet project in trying to will MMA fighters into using elbows to their full potential in countering body punches.

What impressed me so much about Murphy’s fight with Emmett is that it looked like a proof of concept for a strategy that warrants much wider use than it currently sees:

In the first few minutes of the fight, Emmett rattled off a body combination to open up Murphy’s head, but wound up eating a huge counter elbow that put him off it for the rest of the fight. Murphy would fold his lead hand over into an elbow when Emmett dipped down to throw his rear straight to the body, his shoulder coming away from his chin for the elbow to slot in, or look for heavy rear elbows when Emmett planted his feet to flurry.

Throughout the remainder of the fight, Murphy kept the elbows in play whenever Emmett got too aggressive closing distance or opening up in the pocket. With his long range attacks hitting guard or falling short and his flurries getting him chopped up by elbows, Emmett was tamed into fighting at Murphy’s pace and accepting his preferred range.

Once the elbows land clean a few times, the threat of them becomes useful in its own right. Murphy was able to show the elbow to halt Emmett’s advance, having taught him that pushing forward means eating bone straight to the chin or forehead.

Most fighters in MMA who excel with elbows have either built their games around closing distance into them like Tony Ferguson, or else operate best in the clinch like Jon Jones. What has been largely absent from MMA is the archetype of the out-fighting elbow specialist. It’s a fairly common skillset in Muay Thai with a logical system and process behind it.

When a kicking specialist who likes space and time to work faces a marauding boxer or clinch fighter, he often loses the distance to employ his main weapons. Resorting to desperate punching is fraught with risk, wide swings opening the elbows for the clincher or putting him at a huge disadvantage against the boxer. But letting them walk onto a lump of bone makes perfect sense. So slick Femeu kickers often pick up dexterous elbows to mitigate the clearest path to victory against them. Among modern day fighters, Superlek and today’s pound-for-pound great Khunsueklek Boomdeksian demonstrate the principle well. But to see the best example, we need to look at Karuhat Sor.Supawan, a Golden Age great who has worked with Khunsueklek off and on, clearly influencing his style.

Karuhat is perhaps the slickest kicker to ever live, but in his rematch with Lamnamoon Sor.Sumalee, one of the era’s top clinchers, his kicking prowess scarcely mattered. The larger Lamnamoon stormed past Karuhat’s kicks into the clinch, or dumped him on the ground as his feet left the mat. It was Karuhat’s elbows that won him the fight, halting Lamnamoon with bone-on-bone connections and slicing up his face.

Given his size disadvantage and Lamnamoon’s swarming, knee-heavy style, Karuhat couldn’t bang him out in the pocket. Instead, he punches just enough to create distance and set up his elbows, intercepting Lamnamoon on the way in, or slipping out of his clinch locks and dancing away with a sharp elbow. His elbows are weapons of precision, scalpel-like blades that come from all angles with a flick of his arm, needing little weight transfer to make the fearsome Muay Khao hesitate. Lamnamoon’s aggression serves only to carve him up faster as Karuhat is there to meet him with an elbow whenever he gets into his rhythm.

Lamnamoon is a fighter who thrives in urgent, chaotic exchanges, while Karuhat glides through each beat of an exchange like the measure of a poem, giving off an air of serenity when in his element. His elbows force the swarming Muay Khao to harmonize and start fighting beautiful.

Murphy has carved himself into a similar niche lately, his elbows bolstering his thoughtful and tentative outfighting. They serve the role of training his opponents out of the taking actions that make him uncomfortable, taming aggression, and enforcing his preferred distance and pace.

Josh Emmett learned the lesson Murphy wanted to teach him early on, and his chances of scoring a knockout plummeted as he shied away from long combinations to the body and held back on his aggression. Pico, however, refused to learn the same lesson. He had a hammer of a left hook and saw Murphy as a nail, even as he was hitting back. And that wasn’t necessarily a false move in a vacuum - Pico wins his fights by invading space and enforcing his potent offense, not by conceding to the tepid pace of a pot-shotter like Murphy. But the lack of subtlety in Pico’s aggression left him vulnerable.

Effective pressure fighters walk a tightrope between aggression and security. The best of them manage to constantly invade space while creating uneven exchanges, forcing their opponents out of position and then capitalizing. But Pico’s game is predicated on winning clashes. He wants to get in front of his man and stay there, and once he’s there, his superior power and punching mechanics will do the job for him. Less thought is put into how he gets there, when he gets there, and what his opponent does in response.

As a result of Pico’s one-note process, he was constantly feeding Murphy information about his next move while failing to gather or process it himself. Take these two sequences for example:

Pico enters with a jab and shows a level change while thinking about a left hook, prompting Murphy to circle off. Pico follows him by taking a big step with his right foot and squaring his stance, then ducks in on his hips as Murphy feints forward. 30 seconds later, Pico cuts off Murphy’s lateral movement with a head kick and enters with a 1-2, which Murphy again pulls back from. He drifts forward on his rear hand and Murphy knows exactly what’s about to happen before Pico even moves. Pico will step his right foot square to load up a big lead hook and look to change levels. Murphy bends forward a bit as if inviting the hook, then straightens up outside its path and catches Pico ducking into a knee.

As the fight went deeper, Murphy’s ability to gather and process information gave him more opportunities and further closed off Pico’s. His counter elbow made Pico think twice about firing his wild body hooks, he frustrated Pico’s entries, and punished his level changes. Pico had to find another way to engage, but since his earlier work had come through forcing clashes rather than establishing setup tools and building reads, he was firing from the hip.

The fight ended as Pico juked to enter on an angle, his outside step tipping off Murphy to land a perfect spinning elbow.

While the offense Murphy landed directly attacked Pico’s primary weapons and dissuaded his path to victory, Pico’s offense was all its own reward. He wasn’t building off a threat he’d previously established or exploiting a reaction he’d drawn out of Murphy, but playing the next pattern in a rote sequence. He tried a new way to get in to his offense, but it didn’t look like anything Murphy had learned to be wary of, and ultimately left Pico squared up running into the elbow.

Fighters who use these sorts of tricky entries effectively (like TJ Dillashaw and Dominick Cruz) all excel at playing with the information they’re feeding opponents. Dillashaw, for example, will switch his feet on the spot and alternately dart into a rear hand, run into a head kick, hop off to an angle, or pivot off with a check hook. Multiple attacks flow out of the same preliminary motion, exploiting an opponent’s reaction to each and keeping them guessing.

For Pico to compete with elite talent consistently, he’ll need to work on the scaffolding that his power rests upon. Probing jabs and throwaway punches to suggest attacks and gather information on his opponent’s response, offensive options that play off the threat of his left hook, etc. He has a lot of the tools that make a great pressure fighter, but it’s what he does, or doesn’t do, in the moments between engagements that separate him from the elite right now.

On a final note, Murphy took the idea of attacking Pico’s weapons even further by directly attacking his shoulder with an overhook crank. You’ll recall Jon Jones famously using this to damage the shoulder of Glover Teixeira. It was an especially sharp move against Pico, as the shoulder that powers his big left hook is the same one he injured a few years back against Jeremy Kennedy.

The mechanics of the move work by taking a shallow underhook and jacking the elbow inwards and up, externally rotating the shoulder like an americana. It’s a standing version of the “Mir-lock” that frank Mir hit against Pete Williams.

Murphy found the crank when Pico moved his underhook up near the shoulder. In our discussion of Shavkat Rakhmonov, we talked about his use of a low seatbelt underhook around the hip. While we pointed out that Rakhmonov’s bodylocking fails against opponents of similar height and athletic prowess, suggesting instead a Cain Velasquez-style shoulder underhook for effective hitting, that seatbelt underhook protects against this crank by keeping the shoulder tight to the opponent’s body.

Pico struggled to win the handfighting battle on the opposite side of his underhook and would subsequently move it up from Murphy’s waist to his shoulder, but that transition gave Murphy room to pressure down on it and enforce a shallow underhook that he could crank through. Murphy’s ability to frustrate Pico with handfighting was key to putting himself in the right positions. Just going for the crank outright allows the opponent to focus on jacking the underhook up and keeping the elbow deep (watch Randy Couture wrestling on the fence and you’ll see what I mean), but he kept threatening Pico with escapes and positional improvements until he found the right moment.

Murphy’s recent success with elbows has been so refreshing to see in part because he doesn’t come from an extensive Muay Thai background. Instead, they’re a recent development. He and his team saw a tool that would fit his skillset well and did the work to build it into his game, and it’s proven wildly effective.

As boxing in MMA has grown deeper, the average fighter’s hands and defensive acumen have sharpened greatly. But Thai skills like effective use and tactics behind elbows and knees lag far behind, due in part to a lack of crossover and training opportunities between the two arts. Murphy’s recent success with elbows shows that fighters don’t need to have honed their skills for years in Thailand to start chopping people up with elbows - good timing and a strong idea of where they fit into one’s game goes a long way in an art as broad as MMA.

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