Joe Warren: Unpredictably Dangerous

Joe Warren's win over Norifumi KID Yamamoto.

There are two sides to Joe Warren (6-1 MMA), a sort of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde of MMA, and his Bellator featherweight title fight with Joe Soto (9-1 MMA) is a case study in the danger of betting either on or against Warren, and of taking him as an opponent.

Warren is currently preparing for a fight with Sengoku featherweight Grand Prix runner-up Michihiro Omigawa (11-8-1 MMA, #9 IWMMAR), a fight that could land Warren back in the top ten, but watching him fight Soto was rough. Warren is a warrior, a former world champion in freestyle wrestling, and one of the greatest athletes in the featherweight division, but his striking is, for lack of a better term, abysmal. Soto threw him a beating in the first round of their bout that made Warren look borderline ridiculous.

But there is a benefit to being a world class athlete, and that’s a level of explosive power that can, under the right circumstances, overcome a lack of skill. The impotent Jekyll-esque first round performance Warren put on, getting dominated by a superior boxer who succeeded at keeping Warren at bay with effective jabs and head movement that Warren just couldn’t follow, changed quickly. Mr. Hyde comes out with a single solid right-hand to the dome of Soto, and Warren pounces. Soto may have been able to get back to his feet, but it was Warren’s fight. He caught Soto up against the cage and used a knee and a left hand to end that fight, and if he lands those strikes against anyone in the featherweight division, he can win.

There’s a major problem with being the one-punch fighter, though. We’ve seen that will fellow Team Quest fighter Dan Henderson (25-8 MMA, 5-2 UFC, #4 IWMMAR), as well as the greatest weakness of Warren, a lack of submission defense. Warren does look to me like a young Dan Henderson, stiff hands with power to spare, very little head movement, solid wrestling and good aggression on top, but at a few points in Henderson’s career, we’ve seen him give up submissions to solid Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu blackbelts. Warren gave up his first in the second round of the Dream featherweight tournament semi-final, when Bibiano Fernandes (8-2 MMA, #7 IWMMAR) caught him in an early armbar. Fernandes went on to win the tournament and defended his belt successfully against former Shooto welterweight champion Joachim Hansen (19-10-1 MMA).

Fernandes is an inevitable rematch for Warren if both continue to win in the Japanese scene, and the potential for a cross promotional title fight between the freshly crowned Bellator featherweight champion Warren and the Dream title holder is exciting, for those who follow the division outside of the WEC, as the competition will basically be for the top spot outside of the sport’s major promotion of the lighter weightclasses. But on the 25th Warren will return to Dream, the ring and Japan, since his loss to Fernandes almost a year ago, and Omigawa is a tough matchup for him. The real question is, which Warren will show up: the fluffy Dr. Jekyll, or Mr. Hyde.