Rani Yahya's Crushing Top Pressure and Deep Half Shenanigans
Rani Yahya's Crushing Top Pressure and Deep Half Shenanigans
A comprehensive overview of Rani Yahya's eccentric grappling skillset, from his exhausting top pressure to his slick half guard sweeps and how he integrates his takedowns with his half guard game.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu skillsets can be seen as a flowchart. You work to move the fight from a neutral position into one that offers you more options than the opponent, increasing the option-disparity as you move through a series of positions and closer to your end goal - usually mount or the back. Each step along the way shoots off into multiple branches based on the way your opponent responds.
These flowcharts tend to get optimized and trimmed down with experience. If you look at the top grapplers in MMA, most of them don’t do a whole bunch of different things. Rather they have a few things that work very well for them and have developed connective pathways to funnel different types of fighters into the same system.
Demian Maia is the perfect example of the systemized nature of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in MMA. Anyone fighting Maia knows he’s going to try to take you down, force you to accept a butterfly hook so he can begin tripoding over it, push a knee down into 3/4 mount, and pressure you into exposing your back so he can take your neck. It’s the same thing every time, but almost nobody can stop it.
Rani Yahya is the peculiar sort of grappler who bucks this trend. An ADCC champion with 17 wins in the UFC/WEC Bantamweight division, Yahya is one of the better examples of a fighter who has made a pure BJJ style work in MMA. And I do mean pure - over a 20-year MMA career, Yahya never even learned enough striking to set up his takedowns, instead relying almost solely on his grappling to win every fight.
Yet going into a fight with Yahya, his opponents have no idea how he’s going to try to finish them off, because he hasn’t even decided yet. Yahya’s diversity of finishing moves is totally unique among MMA grapplers at a high level. Over the course of his MMA career, Yahya has finished fights with 11 different submissions, including kimuras, heel hooks, and north-south chokes at the UFC level in addition to the more common arm triangles and rear naked chokes.
But Yahya isn’t just spamming whatever attacks come to mind, nor does his diverse submission offense mean that he lacks a coherent system. Instead, Yahya’s system is more concerned with a broad strategic outlook than using specific staging points to funnel opponents into a certain set of moves. Yahya wants to cook his man on top with unrelenting pressure from whatever position they happen to be in. The pressure is designed to wear opponents out and make them desperate. As soon as they make a mistake, Yahya takes what is given to him.
But before we get into his pressure from top position, we’ll examine how those sequences start - with Yahya’s unique mix of takedowns and guard-pulling.
The High Crotch, Crackdown, and Deep Half Shenanigans
Most of Yahya’s takedowns come from diving on a High Crotch. The High Crotch is a takedown with identical penetration to a double leg, but instead of wrapping both legs, the arms are secured around the leg nearest the offensive wrestler’s head. The thing about Rani Yahya’s shot is that everything he does up to the point where he makes contact with his opponent’s leg is awful, yet he’s crafty and wily enough that he still ends up taking just about everyone down.
The biggest key to a good high crotch is posture. In order to go from entry to a smooth finish, you want your back straight and your hips underneath you. Keeping the hips, spine, and head in alignment allows the offensive wrestler to drive in and force the opponent’s weight onto their far foot, which sets up the go-to finishes and keeps them from getting sprawled on.
MMA fighters need to stand more upright than wrestlers due to the threat of strikes, so their weight will usually end up a bit further forward than is ideal, but this is offset by the defender’s own upright posture making it more difficult for them to sprawl and get the leg back. Once in position, the two most consistent finishes are switching to a double leg and driving across with the head, or turning in the opposite direction and threading the trapped leg through the legs to run the pipe. However, both of these finishes are totally inaccessible to Yahya.
In order to get to the hips in strong position for a clean finish, you need to shoot from in close. In MMA, this means you will need to be at least somewhat comfortable striking to get close enough to disguise the shot. At higher levels, you’ll likely need to disguise the penetration of your shot with strikes, or time the opponent mid-strike as his hips open up.
Yahya’s discomfort on the feet forces him to shoot from too far away, so that his posture and positioning is destroyed by the time he’s grabbed the leg. In Figure 1 you can see how Yahya’s extended shot forces him into a poor position with both knees on the mat, his head down and back rounded, and his weight far past his hips. The distance is also too long to maintain his drive, so instead of shooting up and through the opponent to propel them off balance, he ends up shooting to the ground and killing his forward momentum.
Doubling off or running the pipe with such poor posture is impossible against an competent opponent, but all is not lost for Yahya quite yet. With his back bent and head looking at the ground, he will lace his arms together under the knee and suck the leg into him while pressuring the leg outward with his shoulder. This doesn’t get him a takedown, but it does break the opponent down to their butt in what is known in wrestling as the Crackdown position. Figure 2 shows Yahya’s entry into the Crackdown.
The Crackdown is a scrambly position that offers options for both the offensive and defensive fighter. A simple way to think of the Crackdown is that it’s an attempt by the defensive fighter to break the opponent’s posture and prevent them from doubling off. With the bodies tight together, the inside arm doesn’t have room to slide across and finish to both hips. Usually the offensive fighter would prefer to finish from their feet and the position occurs from the defensive fighter sitting the corner, but Yahya’s positioning issues mean that he needs to rely on the Crackdown.
The most important positional cue for the offensive wrestler is that the inside shoulder must remain in the inside pocket of the hip. If the shoulder moves to the outside, you lose your ability to pin the opponent’s hip, and they can begin circling around to take your back.
Yahya will often camp out in Crackdown for a while and wait for a response. A common reaction from his opponent is to plant their free leg on the mat and push off it to flee the position, but this is the exact wrong thing to do. The value of the Crackdown position for the defensive fighter is that it prevents the opponent from controlling both hips, forcing them to settle for control of only the near-side hip. The chest-to-back connection is the only thing preventing the offensive fighter from controlling both hips and finishing the takedown.
Figure 3 shows how several of Yahya’s opponents have ended up handing him the takedown. By pulling away and trying to run from Crackdown, they lose the chest-to-back connection and Yahya can easily slip his head or inside arm through the space created for a clean finish. Yahya will also sometimes hook their trapped leg with his inside leg as he finishes to both hips to hold them in place while he settles on top.
Most of Yahya’s opponents fall into two categories - either they’re poor enough defensive wrestlers to give up the takedown on their own once forced into Crackdown, or they’re good enough defensive wrestlers to prevent Yahya from reaching their hips in the first place. But there have been a couple fights where Yahya had a chance to show off the full depth of his options from the position. Mike Brown and Chase Beebe were far better wrestlers than Yahya so he couldn’t reliably take them down outright, but they were willing to engage with him on the mat and attempt to wrestle out.