Kamaru Usman Says Brock Lesnar Would Beat Jon Jones In A Pure Wrestling Match — Both Wrong For Different Reasons

Kamaru Usman went on the Pound for Pound podcast he co-hosts with Henry Cejudo and answered a fan question: who would win a freestyle wrestling match, Real American Freestyle rules, no MMA, between Jon Jones and Brock Lesnar. Usman picked Lesnar. Cejudo, an Olympic gold medalist in freestyle and a two-division UFC champion, picked Jones. Jones then mocked Usman on Instagram. Everyone weighed in. Nobody actually wrestled.

This is a podcast hot-take debate, which means we should treat it like the bar argument it is. Two retired MMA fighters, one ex-WWE-and-UFC heavyweight, and one ex-UFC light heavyweight, none of whom have wrestled freestyle competitively in this decade, are being asked to predict a match the only real freestyle wrestling promotion in the country didn't book for a reason. Fine. The answers are still worth looking at.

Usman's reasoning was wafer-thin. Per the Pound for Pound clip, he said: "I would just say the sheer size of Brock Lesnar and how Brock Lesnar wrestled."

That's the entire argument. Lesnar is big. Lesnar wrestled. The end.

Here's the part Usman skipped over. Brock Lesnar is not just "a big guy who wrestled." He won the NCAA Division I heavyweight wrestling title at the University of Minnesota in 2000. He won two NJCAA national titles at Bismarck State before that. He was an Olympic team alternate. By the time he showed up in WWE he had a wrestling resume more decorated than 99% of the people who have ever called themselves wrestlers in this country. That resume is the actual foundation of the argument, not window dressing.

When you strip away the vague appeal to "sheer size," what remains is a fact-based claim: Lesnar's credentials as a heavyweight wrestler are simply superior to Jones's community college pedigree. This is not an insult to Jones as an MMA fighter—his wrestling inside the octagon is legitimately elite at 205 pounds. But elite MMA wrestling and elite freestyle wrestling are not synonymous. The skill sets overlap but they diverge in crucial ways. In freestyle, there are no elbows from top position. There are no leg kicks. There are no submissions. The sport is pure positional domination, and it rewards the exact things Lesnar built his entire training life around.

Saying Lesnar would beat Jones because of "sheer size" is like saying Mike Tyson would win a boxing match because his arms are short. It's true. It's also not the reason. The real reason is that Lesnar's wrestling résumé, his technical mastery at the highest amateur level, and his years of dedicated freestyle training before his professional career give him a credential advantage that size merely amplifies. Usman arrived at a defensible conclusion but abandoned the actual evidence halfway through explaining it.

Cejudo's answer is the more interesting one. Cejudo took the present-day side and picked Jones, but the way he got there is the story. He conceded the prime-version premise outright: "If it was in his prime, Jones ain't beating Brock in wrestling." His pivot to Jones was based on age and accumulated damage on the Lesnar side, not on the underlying skill comparison. This is a crucial distinction that the broader debate glossed over entirely.

That's the headline buried in the debate format. Henry Cejudo, Olympic gold medalist at 21, double UFC champion, the only person in the room with an elite wrestling resume, agreed with the take Usman was making. He only ducked the final prediction by importing a different question. What would happen now versus what would happen between prime versions are not the same fight. Both men, in different ways, are picking the same outcome on the historical version. Neither says it cleanly.

Cejudo's move is intellectually honest but strategically cautious. He knows what the wrestling résumés say. He knows Lesnar's credentials are superior. But he also understands that Lesnar has been away from pure wrestling for over fifteen years, performing in a staged entertainment format rather than competing. Meanwhile, Jones has maintained a level of athletic conditioning and fighting competence, even if it's not directly transferable to freestyle wrestling. By shifting the conversation from prime-to-prime comparison to a hypothetical present-day match, Cejudo gets to have it both ways: he acknowledges the historical truth while hedging with a practical observation about current physical state. It's a politician's answer dressed up as wrestling analysis.

Now the third piece. Jon Jones's wrestling background, the part nobody in this debate brought up, is a year at Iowa Central Community College. He won an NJCAA national title in 2007 and then dropped out. He has not been on a freestyle wrestling mat in any organized capacity in nearly two decades. The MMA wrestling Jones has done is excellent. He used it against Daniel Cormier, who is a two-time Olympian and the closest thing in MMA history to a stylistic answer to the prime-Lesnar archetype, and that is a fight Jones won. He won it under MMA rules using elbows from top position. Not by points on a wrestling mat.

Pure freestyle wrestling, the question being asked, between his JuCo title and Lesnar's NCAA-and-Olympic-alternate run, is not a debate the resumes have. It's a debate two podcasters have because the resumes are unequal in a direction that doesn't make for content. The disparity is precisely why the question exists—it's designed to provoke disagreement. But the disagreement should be about how to weight current physical condition against historical credentials, not about whether Lesnar has superior freestyle wrestling training.

Jon Jones, predictably, did not respond to any of this with an argument. He posted on Instagram: "I'm getting my hand raised against you and Brock in the same night."

Which is funny on its own terms. Usman, in this exchange, was not doing the trash talk Jones is responding to. Usman was answering a fan question on a podcast about a wrestling match that does not exist. Jones's response is a counter-callout to a callout that was not made. There is no night. There is no match. The bravado is divorced from any actual context or challenge. It's a reflex, not a rebuttal.

This response tells you everything you need to know about how Jones processed this debate: not as technical wrestling analysis, but as a slight to his honor that required a performative counter-threat. The content of the wrestling argument didn't matter. What mattered was reasserting dominance through the only medium available to him—social media posturing. It's not a bad instinct for an MMA fighter, but it's useless as an answer to a wrestling question.

The thing this whole debate keeps walking past is that none of the three named men are currently wrestlers. Lesnar has been doing scripted WWE for over a decade and a half. Jones is in a retirement-and-un-retirement loop that produces more press releases than fights. Usman and Cejudo are retired from fighting. The promotion that would actually book this, Real American Freestyle, is in the middle of building a roster around legitimate wrestling talent. RAF events feature Gable Steveson on the card. The promotion's bench is real wrestlers actively competing at elite levels. Neither of the men this question is about would clear the talent floor.

So we are debating, at length, on a podcast, on social media, in articles like this one, a wrestling match between a man in WWE storylines and a man taking calls about whether he is retired this week. The wrestling content of the debate is roughly equal to the wrestling content of WrestleMania. It's entertainment framing masquerading as technical analysis. The medium itself undermines the premise.

Both Usman and Cejudo gave answers that almost get there. Usman's answer is right and his reasoning is wrong: the size argument is way thinner than the NCAA-champion-plus-Olympic-alternate argument sitting right next to it. He should have led with the credentials, not buried them. Cejudo's answer is wrong and his reasoning has a bigger hole than he flagged: he picked Jones based on a present-day comparison after agreeing the historical comparison goes the other way, which means he's predicting an ad-hoc match rather than the one being asked about. He essentially conceded the wrestling portion of the argument then picked Jones anyway, which is coherent only if you believe Lesnar's years away from pure wrestling matter more than his superior credentials. Maybe they do. But that's not what he argued.

Both wrong for different reasons. Both more correct than Jon Jones, who responded to a question about his wrestling resume by pretending to fight two people in the same night, neither of whom asked him to. It's a non-answer that doubles as bravado, and it avoids engaging with the actual premise of the question.

If Real American Freestyle wants this match, here's the real answer: nobody on this list has wrestled freestyle in this decade, and any prediction is bar-room speculation between guys who used to wrestle. The podcast debate had value only because Cejudo brought credibility to it. The moment he conceded the historical version, the debate's outcome was already determined. Everything after that was just creative hedging.

The speculation's just better when the only Olympic gold medalist in the room admits, on the way to picking the other side, that the historical answer was Brock the whole time.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• UFC Legend Claims Brock Lesnar Would Defeat Jon Jones In A Pure Wrestling Match (BJJDoc)
• Jon Jones Mocks Kamaru Usman After Brock Lesnar Wrestling Prediction (LowKick MMA)
• Jon Jones reacts to Kamaru Usman picking Brock Lesnar to beat him in RAF wrestling match (Yahoo Sports)
• UFC Legends Disagree On Who Would Win Between Jon Jones & WWE's Brock Lesnar (Wrestling Inc.)