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GSP fought in a time when wrestlers made up like 70% of the top ranks, and nobody cared that much about diversifying. They committed to their primary discipline.GSP is thought to possess the best MMA wrestling in history. But he fought in a time when all we saw was american folkstyle. I can't help but to find GSP's wrestling not so great when I compare it to Dagestanis and Chechens.
I think that GSP's wrestling was the best at the time due to his wrestling's Soviet lineage (Montreal wrestling club is essentially an eastern euro diaspora club) . But now that we have that Caucasian benchmark, how does it rank?
The Dagestanis & Chechens are good, no doubt, but one of the reasons they've had so much success with their wrestling is because everyone in North America evolved to cope with the vanguard of the sport, and that entailed being an all-around fighter, specifically a kickboxer with a focus on takedown/submission defense who spends a lot of time working above-waist wrestling against the cage. This is the Rochambeau effect of MMA (which exists in all professional sport).
At the highest level, the strategies and skillsets evolve so finely they eventually grow into a niche where only someone who hasn't evolved within that niche can come in and benefit by undermining its lack of balance by returning to the basics. But then that will be countered as the athletes adapt to this disruption. The well-rounded kickboxing style I described above was getting a bit lean on wrestling defense against truly elite wrestling, and the Russians have exploited that, but as fighters adapt, to neutralize the offensive potential of wrestling, you'll see a repeat of what we learned before; that it's ultimately easier to neutralize the offense of elite grapplers than it is to neutralize the offense of elite strikers.
To analogize this to American football, think of grappling as the run game. It dominated early. It's still necessary, and always will be. You can't hope to pass relentlessly and without the defense shutting you down if you can't keep them honest by running the ball. But, at some point, someone figured out the "forward lateral", and later, this was developed with sophistication into the West Coast offense. Today, pass-dominant offenses still dominate football. This is like those strikers who work very hard on wrestling and submission defense. They got too careless, too loose, too weak with their own run game and their own run defense...but if you think the pass is going away as the predominant weapon in American football, I've got bad news for you.