Originally Posted by
turbozed
Here's my analysis of Morales/Lopez. If you guys have anything to add or any criticism of what's already there, definitely don't hold back.
Benito Lopez is an 8-0 pro fighter with 2 amateur wins as well according to Tapology. But on Youtube, you can find at least another 5 amateur fights of his which all end with a 1st round TKO win. According to Benitez himself, he's been fighting since the age of 15. So apparently despite being only 23 years young, he's been in the game for at least 7 or 8 years. Despite having watched about 10 of his fights, I still can't get a good read on how good (or perhaps bad) his striking skills are.
Lopez pretty much blasted his amateur competition (many of whom were making their amateur debut or only had 1 or 2 fights). These fights look pretty much the same. Lopez comes forward with punches and high kicks until his opponent falls down and he lands in mount and pummels them. He is very long and rangy for bantamweight, at 5'11 and with a 73" reach. He was able to squeak out a split decision win against his toughest opponent Steven Peterson in DWCS. During this fight we finally got to see more than a few seconds of his game.
In the striking department, Lopez's style can be described as a more raw and unbalanced version of Alex Caceres. He's rangy but doesn't seem to know how to use this much to his advantage. Doesn't throw a jab very often except maybe to paw at his opponent while finding range for his kicking game or the infrequent and wound-up right straight. He's put out amateur opponents with head kicks but the ones thrown against Peterson appeared more slappy than crushing. One powerful technique that he was able to land over and over was the flying knee, which he seems to time better than his punches. He only needed to land 1 of these flying knees to turn the lights out against Rick "The Illness" James. He landed 5 of 5 against Peterson.
Despite obviously having a knack for timing knees and some more unconventional strikes (like elbows in the clinch or a flurry of step-in uppercuts), Lopez's overall striking game has a few holes. His hands are usually dangerously low and he's often falling forwards into his opponents when he throws. He doesn't appear very comfortable with pocket punching and forward pressure from his opponent. Due to his lack of balance, it seemed likely that a competent wrestler would likely be able to ground him rather easily. To Lopez's credit, he was able to stop this from happening in Rds 1 and 3 of his fight with Peterson. In some of his fights, he's been content to eat leg kicks and bodykicks without checking or countering.
Morales is less diverse but definitely much more balanced striker. He's got fast hands and can throw compact straight punches. This helped him control the striking exchanges in the 1st round against both Perez and Soukhamthath. Against Perez, he was able to time naked leg kicks and send a right hand at Perez's face. By the later rounds, however, Morales' striking discipline and sharpness drops off dramatically. In the 3rd round of the Perez fight he was drunk off fatigue and throwing off-balanced and weak punches. In the Soukhamtath fight, he couldn't do much but put up a high guard, resulting in Soukhamthath spamming about 10 strikes (left hooks and knees) to Morales' gut.
Morales is hittable, and gets tagged with some pretty hard shots in all of his fights. Despite this, he was only finished by Almeida who really wasn't able to shut the lights off either. It was a well placed liver shot that crumpled Morales, but his body shut off before his chin gave out. Besides a perfectly placed flying knee or head kick, it doesn't look like Lopez has the type of power to stop Morales coming forward, much less KO him.
Matching the two up, I think Morales would have a slight advantage in most exchanges. Unless Lopez intends on spamming flying knees from the get-go (a tactic which would more likely end up with him on his back rather than getting a KO), Lopez would need to do a lot of his funk striking moving backwards. He doesn't have the head movement or hand speed to stay in the pocket with Morales for very long. And a lot of his offense relies on naked kicks, which Morales has the chops to counter with punches or maybe score a takedown against.
At least this is how it might look in the 1st round. In the later rounds, both fighters become much sloppier and lose a lot of power. It's hard to tell who will be most affected. If it's Morales that's getting the worse end of it, at the very least Morales can take it to the ground. Lopez is a good scrambler and, against poor competition, has found his way to get top position against his opponents, but Rd2 of the Peterson fight is a cause for concern. Though it looked like Morales had zero wrestling abilities in his last fight against Johns, Morales has decent grappling and most likely the advantage against Lopez in that department.
Lot of question marks in this one, and even odds seems reasonable. If I had to pick, probably Morales.
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