Jake Collier Came Out of UFC Fight Night 88 With Things to Fix

Jake Collier spoke with MMAjunkie about his win over Alberto Uda at UFC Fight Night 88. Some highlights are below:

On his performance: “It’s a little bittersweet. I’m super stoked I got a win. We’re in the UFC – you always want to win. But it sucks that I have this glitch where I started slow. I’ve got to get that fixed, because realistically, I should have been way better. This should never have happened. I work too hard with my wrestling coaches and my guys. We drilled specifically for this to not happen. And I let it happen. Glad I won, but there are a lot of things I need to work on.”

On the spinning back kick finish: “He’s a tall guy, like myself. He stands with his elbows high, muay Thai style. So if you feint anything in the face, he’s going to put his hands even higher. And then you’ve got all this area that you can just blast. We’d been working a lot on that. I noticed in the first round I threw a spinning back fist real quick, and it landed. I could tell he wasn’t used to spinning stuff, because I was trying to throw feints and he wasn’t even reacting to them. Another thing, once I got him up against the fence, there was no running backwards. So when I threw it, he had nowhere to go, really. So it landed solid. And then for whatever reason I decided to throw another one right after that. And it landed and it dropped him.”

on getting his nose broken in the first round: “I was like, ‘Damn, he got me. That was solid. Touché. Now I’ve got to get you back. Now I’ve got to land something nasty to get you back.’ But really, it felt solid. I was trying to calm me down so I could breathe better. And calm him, slow him down so I could regain my composure. You can let it break you and quit. But how are you gonna tell all your coaches, ‘I quit because I broke my nose?’ when you just spent the last three months of your life preparing, taking them away from their families every day. I’m not built that way.”