A paradigm shift is defined as a fundamental change in assumptions. Well, by the end of Saturday night’s Strikeforce: Lawler vs. Shields event on Showtime, when the dust had settled on both welterweight Jake Shields’ quick win over top-tier middleweight Robbie Lawler and Brett Rogers’ lighting-fast destruction of former UFC champ Andrei Arlovski, the world of MMA was left with one heck of a paradigm shift.
Lawler should have murdered Shields. Never mind that the Midwest slugger with the solid sprawl has been through hell and back with a wide range of opponents at the highest levels of competition; his championship reign with EliteXC was among the 185-pounders, a world a full weight class above Shields’ plane of existence. As such, he should have been a bad match-up for the EliteXC welterweight champ, who is a wizard on the ground but has sometimes struggled to get it there. No, when Lawler vs. Shields was announced, the general consensus was that Shields’ takedown attempts would be met with a wall of hips and fistfuls of doom, and the Cesar Gracie-trained 170-pounder would retreat back to his rightful division and stay there. In just over two minutes Shields proved his doubters wrong.
One Heck of a Paradigm Shift
A paradigm shift is defined as a fundamental change in assumptions. Well, by the end of Saturday night’s Strikeforce: Lawler vs. Shields event on Showtime, when the dust had settled on both welterweight Jake Shields’ quick win over top-tier middleweight Robbie Lawler and Brett Rogers’ lighting-fast destruction of former UFC champ Andrei Arlovski, the world…
|
