Corey Anderson: ‘Everybody knows Jon Jones isn’t the greatest striker’

Jon Jones and Corey Anderson never got to square off during their time together in the UFC light heavyweight division. However, The Ultimate Fighter season 19 winner believes there are certain reasons that success has started being found against one of the all-time greats.

In Jones’ last two title defenses, he went the distance with the likes of Thiago Santos and Dominick Reyes. With the first resulting in a split decision and the second a unanimous, both for Jones, many in the MMA community disagreed with the results.

Out of 1554 fan scorecards submitted to MMADecisions.com, 54.8 percent had Santos as the victor. 49.5 percent had 48-47 Santos as the most common scorecard. As for the Reyes fight, it was all the more controversial as 76.7 percent of 3130 votes scored the bout for the challenger. Like the Santos bout, 48-47 was the most common score in favor of Reyes at 69.7 percent

After seeing these matchups play out, the former UFC title hopeful in Anderson believes it can be boiled down to Jones’ weakest area being his striking.

“Everybody knows Jon Jones isn’t the greatest striker,” Anderson told Fightful. “Jon is a great martial artist, but he’s not a great striker. He’s not really technical with his boxing, he’s not good at defense. His defense is very lackadaisical I feel. He’s just long so he gets away with things.

“Thiago is a really good striker. He came out running, chasing, throwing kicks and punches until he tore his knees and he was still throwing those heavy punches. That kind of put Jon Jones on the backfoot which made it such a good fight. Thiago did what he had to do with what he’s good at to put Jon Jones in a close decision fight. That’s why I feel he did so good in the fight.”

In 2020, the 14-5 former top UFC contender made the jump over to Bellator. Corey Anderson made a successful debut in November at Bellator 251 by earning a second-round TKO against Melvin Manhoef.