I had kinda sorta seen bits and pieces of them before but had never really sat down and watched some all the way through. I figured since I got paramount plus it was about time.
It may have been that I just caught some bad ones, but I was not super thrilled with the 2 I watched. I found them boring.
I watched one womens and one mens. During the womens one, my wife told me we couldnt watch the women anymore. lol. I guess because of the wrestling.
Anyway, the biggest problem I found with the fights was that they could become locked down wrestling after a take down for several minutes. They could basically be just laying there for 2 or 3 minutes.
They should really consider shortening their 5 minute rounds and maybe increasing the number of rounds.
Anyway, like I said, maybe the ones I watched just werent that good but I think I prefer boxing. In boxing, yeah, they can clinch, but the ref always breaks them up and they are forced to move on.
Yeah, I hate when they’re just locked like that. But some fights are very exciting and worth watching so I watch the boring ones so I don’t miss anything good. Sometimes the boring ones suddenly get exciting too.
When they’re on the ground they’re not just laying there, there’s a lot of strategy going on. Your post makes me remember that when I first started watching MMA the ground game used to bore me too, I had forgotten about that. But once I started watching the top fighters grappling and I knew what they were attempting to do it became an intregal part of the fight. Chad Mendez taking down Conor McGregor for example, was an exciting part of the fight. If you haven’t seen that fight I recommend watching it on YouTube.
It’s funny because I was big into UFC and MMA back when it kind of became an integrated sport instead of “boxer versus wrestler” or “Judo versus Tae Kwon Do,” and I remember when people started cheering guard passes and when the ground game started to get appreciated more than it was when people wanted to see knockouts instead of submissions.
Now when people throw off wild submissions the crowd loves it, like a random D’arce choke out of nowhere.
Watching Khabib with his incredibly oppressive ground game is a spectacle of the sport.
I like seeing fighters with different expertise fighting each other. The boxers and kickboxers want to stay on their feet, while the wrestlers and BJJ want to take the fight to the ground.
That said, sometimes when the fight is on the ground both fighters can get locked up, meaning that any move from either fighter will put them in a worse position. It’s Nash equilibrium game theory. It’s the same as chess players drawing a game by 3-fold repetition.
If the fight is on the ground, and there’s no movement from either fighter for 30 seconds, the ref should bring the fighters back to their feet.
