Leon Edwards has forced his opponents to fight at his pace
Prior to facing Leon Edwards back in 2019, Rafael Dos Anjos had attempted 8.58 significant strikes per minute in his victories and 6.80 in his losses. Against Edwards, he averaged only 6.76 attempts per minute and dropped a unanimous decision.
Obviously fighters need to throw strikes in order to land strikes, and most fighters need to land strikes in order to be successful. Edwards routinely robs his opponents of the ability to attempt a high volume of strikes.
It is a good trait for him to have since he has not really shown standout defense. He avoids 55% of the significant attempts against him, which is solid but not spectacular. In fact it is slightly below the average striking defense for a ranked UFC fighter, 57%.
In his UFC career, Edwards has allowed his opponents to attempt only 4.55 significant strikes per minute. This is the 11th lowest striking output against rate among ranked fighters. If you look at the top fighters in this metric, you will see a lot of top-position grapplers and a lot of plodding heavyweights. Edwards does not really fall into either one of those categories.
Edwards is not an overly active striker either. He attempts only 5.29 significant strikes per minute, which is the 16th lowest rate among ranked fighters. As you can see in the following charts, Edwards is not necessarily an outlier, but he is certainly on the lower end of offensive and defensive striking activity.
It is rather impressive that Edwards is able to be successful at this kind of pace for two main reasons. First, he still does the majority of his striking at distance. Second, he is able to force this kind of pace on his opponents.
During his UFC career, 67% of Edward’s landed significant strikes have been at distance, which is only slightly below the average for a ranked UFC fighters, 70%. Among the top 11 fighters in terms of striking output against, only Francis Ngannou comes close. That is probably due to the fact that he does this to opponents.
Edwards does spend his fair share of time in the clinch, and he does average 1.39 takedowns per 15 minutes of fight time. However, the majority of his striking is done at range. The fact that he accomplishes this while limiting the attempts of his opponents is rather impressive.
Better analysts of striking can break down exactly what Edwards does to force this kind of striking pace on his opponents, but it is certainly a trend. His last eight opponents have seen their striking output decline significantly against Edwards. Even fighters who are offensive dynamos like Bryan Barberena and Vicente Luque saw their rate of attempts decline drastically.
It will be interesting to see how this plays against Belal Muhammad on Saturday. He comes into this fight with an 11.22 striking output rate, and he is coming off his highest output performance to date. In his last fight against Dhiego Lima, Muhammad attempted 17.60 significant strikes per minute. Even if Edwards makes a dent in that pace, it will still be much faster than he would probably like.
Muhammad has also been a very active wrestler. He has attempted 7.19 takedowns per 15 minutes of fight time and landed 2.03. If he is able to disrupt Edward’s normal striking style, it could allow him to dictate the pace of the fight. If things get off script for Edwards, Muhammad could pull away.
It is not out of the question. Muhammad has shown the ability to push the pace with his striking and grappling. However, recently Edwards has been able to force opponents to fight his fight. If he is able to do that once more, he will likely walk out of the cage as a winner.