Sherdog.com’s 2014 All-Violence Team

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2014 All-Violence Second Team

Heavyweight: Matt Mitrione
Light Heavyweight: Ovince St. Preux
Middleweight: Yoel Romero
Welterweight: Matt Brown
Lightweight: Rafael dos Anjos
Featherweight: Charles Oliveira
Bantamweight: Ronda Rousey
Flyweight: Kiyotaka Shimizu

Heavyweight: Mitrione is not a picture of well-rounded violence. He has never submitted a foe in his career and there is not much reason to expect him to, apart from random chance. After all, we are talking about a man nicknamed “Meathead” that gleefully brags about not working on his grappling while daring his foes to try to exploit it. Still, Mitrione reminded us in 2014 that sometimes in MMA, especially in the heavyweight division, it just does not matter. Going 3-0 in the UFC heavyweight division is not automatically worthy of serious laurels, but the Indianapolis-based fighter dusted legitimate opposition in Shawn Jordan, Derrick Lewis and Gabriel Gonzaga.

Mitrione's surprising athleticism and quickness afford him some major advantages against bulkier plodders, and it showed. Jordan went down with one second left in the first round under a hail of endless accurate punches; Lewis, a ferocious puncher, walked into a short right hook and brutal ground-and-pound that wiped him out in 41 seconds; and Gonzaga ate a left hook and follow-up shots that took him out in just 1:59. In total, Mitrione needed just 43 significant strikes over 7:39 of cage time to totally waste three solid, serviceable heavyweights.

Light Heavyweight: St. Preux was not perfect in 2014, but he was still plenty violent. The former University of Tennessee linebacker dropped an ugly, tedious unanimous decision to Ryan Bader in August in a fight that sucked enough to stick in your brain. However, that was the lone slip for St. Preux on the year, as otherwise, he was eyebrow-raising ruthless. Nikita Krylov paid the ultimate price for holding onto a guillotine took long on the bottom and got choked out cold with the Jason Von Flue special. He showed his unorthodox submission arsenal again three months later, becoming the first man to tap Ryan Jimmo in a bizarre situation where OSP broke Jimmo's right arm with a kick and then immediately chicken-winged his left arm in a flash.

St. Preux saved his best -- or worst, depending on how you see it -- for last, heading to Brazil on two weeks' notice to face one of the country's all-time great fighters, Mauricio Rua. OSP landed one left hook to drop “Shogun” on his face, then 12 more lefts straight to the face to disintegrate the legend, prompting a level of nostalgic despair only surpassed by Frankie Edgar hammering a hapless B.J. Penn back into retirement.

Middleweight: Romero is a violent enigma. The 2000 Olympic freestyle wrestling silver medalist occasionally hits breathtaking slams and takedowns with regularity, like he did in his April bout with Brad Tavares; and sometimes he abandons his wrestling all together. Sometimes he prefers to box, perhaps pretending he is his younger brother, Yoan Pablo Hernandez, who is the true, legitimate cruiserweight boxing champion of the world. Sometimes, he stands around getting his ass kicked for 13 minutes before exploding into a violent torrent of punches and elbows, like he did against Derek Brunson in January.

On the odd occasion, he will get nearly knocked out at the end of the second round, get extra time between rounds via bizarre circumstance (see: cutman applies too much vaseline, corner intentionally leaves stool in the cage) and then waylay his opponent with a vicious, desperate punching assault the minute the third round starts, as he did to Tim Kennedy at UFC 178 in September. You never know what you will get with “The Soldier of God,” like a box of chocolates filled with plastic explosives.

Welterweight: Sorry Matt Brown, you cannot be the most violent guy on the block every year. After taking first-team All-Violence honors at 170 pounds the last two years, “The Immortal” has to settle for silver this time around. Despite going 1-1 in 2014, Brown has little about which to hang his head. He was not defeated by some random mid-level welterweight; he endured a brutal 25-minute war of attrition with the “Fighter of the Year” and new UFC champ, Robbie Lawler. Despite taking brutal punishment to the head and body, Brown actually out-landed Lawler in significant strikes (82 to 80), total strikes (89 to 87) and scored just as many takedowns (two). Submitting to the odds is simply not a Brown tactic and nowhere is that more viscerally reflected than in his third-round stoppage of Erick Silva in May.

Spurred on by a wild, partisan Cincinnati crowd, Brown overcame a liver kick knockdown mere seconds into the fight, followed by nearly three minutes of back mount. The Xenia, Ohio, native escaped and launched an offensive onslaught that earned him Sherdog.com “Round of the Year” honors. He walked through body kick after body kick from the Brazilian, landing 161 total strikes, 118 of them significant, going five-for-five on takedowns and even throwing in four solid submission attempts en route to a third-round stoppage and being shortlisted for Sherdog.com's “Fight of the Year.” Naturally, I want Brown to fight four times a year, every year, but truthfully, a single Matt Brown fight is likely to contain 10 times the violence of your average MMA engagement.

Lightweight: In April, the shockingly improved dos Anjos had his five-fight UFC winning streak snapped by 22-0 Dagestani hard man Khabib Nurmagomedov. The Brazilian could not stop Nurmagomedov's takedowns or escape the constant rain of ground-and-pound. Instead of being a defeatist, dos Anjos took the loss in stride, got back to work in the gym and immediately ratcheted up his ass kicking. It started mildly, punching out veteran Jason High in a controversial second-round stoppage. However, in August, the +280 underdog dos Anjos rode into Tulsa, Okla., and punched former UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson's lights out in two and a half minutes.

Ironically, while 2014 saw dos Anjos emerge as a much greater fight-finishing threat, his most brutal work was not a stoppage but a 15-minute mauling of Nate Diaz. Dos Anjos out-landed Diaz in significant strikes 77-13, and Diaz landed nine of his in the first round alone. Dos Anjos tormented the younger Diaz brother, chopping him up with leg kicks that had him limping within minutes and nearly crippled by the fight's end. Diaz's right leg was colored red, purple and black, but so was his face, as dos Anjos hammered him with constant punches and elbows from top position after his foe could no longer stand. It is a damn good thing dos Anjos has become so potent, as he will need every shred of offense he can muster to dethrone the sport's lightweight king and violence genius Anthony Pettis at UFC 185 in Dallas this March.

Featherweight: Make no bones about it, missing weight is unprofessional and unnerving. In 2014, Oliveira missed weight for his December bout with Jeremy Stephens, this coming after his slated Sept. 5 rematch with Nik Lentz was canceled when “do Bronx” weighed in at 150 pounds, then fell ill on fight day due the effects of his weight cut. However, even acknowledging those caveats, there was perhaps no more thrilling grappler on the year than Oliveira. A smooth triangle on Andy Ogle while laying perpendicular to his foe in guard and being stacked and pounded? “Do Bronx” did it.

In June, he became the first fighter to ever submit grappling wiz Hatsu Hioki, doing so with his own patented anaconda-grip, high-angle, arm-trap guillotine choke in the second round, culminating in both Sherdog.com's “Submission of the Year” honors and No. 2 in “Round of the Year” polling. Somehow, despite forcing Hioki to tap, he could not get the submission against Stephens but still dominated the fight with constant scrambles, back control and submission threats. Weight-cutting is a learned skill and process, but even with all the Brazilian jiu-jitsu privates in the world, you cannot teach Oliveira's innate submission creativity or execution.

Bantamweight: In 2012, bantamweight empress Rousey became the second woman to appear on the All-Violence Team, following Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino's third-team selection in 2010. Ever the trailblazer, Rousey is now the first woman elected to two All-Violence squads, earning second-team honors once again. In her UFC title defense against previously unbeaten Sara McMann at UFC 170, Rousey landed 21 strikes in 66 seconds, folding 2000 Olympic freestyle wrestling silver medalist McMann in half against the cage with knees to the body in the clinch.

Her next title defense against Canadian Alexis Davis at UFC 175 in July was even more brief, yet somehow even more brutal. The entire fight was jab, right cross, head-and-arm throw which had Davis out the second she hit the mat and the nine quick shots that followed. It looked like a scene from a future action movie in which the “Rowdy” one might be featured. No wonder she won the ESPY for “Best Female Athlete” in 2014, becoming the first MMA fighter to win a piece of ESPN's sports hardware. The only critique of Rousey's violence game? She really, really needs to work on her Ric Flair chops.

Flyweight: Let us pretend Shimizu is a baseball player and, no, not just because he is Japanese. This season, Shimizu did not face the best pitchers in the world, but damn if he did not hit some 500-foot, upper-deck, out-of-the-stadium-onto-the-highway jacks. In March, he defended his 125-pound King of Pancrase title against Atsushi Yamamoto; and after battering him with punches and dropping him, he could have easily swarmed with ground-and-pound to finish. Instead, Shimizu consciously reared back and delivered a debilitating deluge of soccer kicks to incapacitate his foe. He then bashed up Yasutaka Ishigami with his fists and forced a doctor stoppage in five minutes.

Then, on New Year's Eve, rather than waste time trying to pound away in Yuya Shibata's guard as his foe threw up a triangle, he picked him up and power-bombed him unconscious on the mat like a pint-sized Quinton Jackson. Shimizu is not the best unsigned Japanese flyweight -- that honor likely goes to Deep champion Yuki Motoya or Shooto standout Hiromasa Ogikubo -- but more than any other, he seems to goes out of his way to inflict maximum damage when possible, which is the very ethos of this list.

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