Rousey isn’t a puncher and has never been, yet she decided for some reason to try something different last night. It looked like she never even tried for the submission win, which is what she’s best at.
That was an old fashioned ass whupping. Judo girl against a champion boxer. Rousey never stood a chance. I’m glad it ended quick. I would have hated seeing her busted up for round after round. She was pretty much helpless out there.
A rematch is a waste of time. Rousey can’t learn to box in just a few months. She’ll be knocked out again.
I’m thinking her ego got the best of her and she deceived herself into thinking she could beat Holm at her own game, something she had success with against Bethe Corriea who was known as a striker. But Corriea was not a former professional boxer, or even all that great shakes as an MMA fighter, having only turned to it three or four years ago in an attempt to lose weight.
As I understand it Rousey did get Holm to the ground once but was unable to armbar her.
I imagine this puts an end to fantasies of Rousey beating Floyd Mayweather.
There are definite rules, but there are also two things to take into account. One, the refs are human, and it takes a second to evaluate whether a person on the ground is “out” or will start defending themselves from the ground. A second is a LONG time when your opponent is trying to keep you on the ground. Two, Herb Dean (the ref) has a reputation for standing fighters up and/or ending fights early, particularly to the benefit of White’s favorite fighters. I bet he had in the back of his mind going in that he’d damn well better make sure any call he made against Rousey was above reproach, AND that he gave her every chance to turn things around.
I could watch that video on loop ALL DAY.
Damn.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t follow the sport but I have to wonder about the depth of analysis that is applied to it. Before the fight Rousey is an overwhelming favorite and the OP asks of Holm, “…how about making it past the 1st round?” After the fight Rousey is so overmatched that " The fixes she needs to make to her game will take years if even possible."
The only dissenting opinion I saw before the fight was on fivethirtyeight Ronda Rousey Is Fighting The Anti-Ronda Rousey.
How come no one seems to have latched on to the obvious fact that Rousey had never fought anyone with Holm’s striking ability? Was it just some blind spot for all the pundits?
Well, for one thing no one expected Rousey to try to slug it out with her. Everyone expected that Rousey would take Holm down to the ground pretty easily and that Holm would be finished once that happened.
This was a great fight, I think Rousey is still the best all around female fighter in MMA, but I think some of her weaknesses have been exposed. Strikers or former boxers have a mixed record in MMA, fighters who rely too heavily on trying to out box someone usually get beat when going up against a grappler, but Holly played great defense against that and was able to land a lot of punches against Ronda.
Any boxer who is able to block a grappler’s take downs and keep the fight a striking match is going to be able to put a judo specialist into a world of pain, which is essentially what happened. I also think Ronda had never had to fight in this much pain before, getting your face punched in isn’t fun, and Ronda has never had that happen. I know smart money is always on the more typical takedown/grappling/submission artists in MMA vs boxers, but in a toughness battle there’s few people I’d pick over a boxer. Boxing is a brutal sport, and people who have risen to world championship level in boxing may get beat in a MMA fight pretty badly but they’re tough as hell. Rousey doesn’t have that toughness.
Holm was also a fighter used to (from her boxing and her MMA career) to work a game plan over a long fight. Holm’s total fighting time in professional MMA fights is actually substantially longer than Rousey’s because Holm wins by grinding it out and working relatively long fights. I still think Rousey is great, but I also think to a degree Rousey’s career trajectory has shown relative weakness in her weight division in UFC, most of the fighters she’s dominated were not good fighters.
Because historically strikers don’t beat grapplers. This has been true since the 90s days when UFC was essentially an underground sport.
Strikers (read boxers or kickboxers) who transition to MMA sometimes do really well, but only by significantly improving a ground game. That doesn’t mean they have to become the equivalent of a lifetime practitioner of judo, but they have to do a lot of work on learning to block take downs so they can work a striker’s fight, and the reality is it’s not typical that you’ll block 100% of take downs against a good fighter. So the boxer also needs to learn how to stay alive when the fight does go to the ground, and be able to get back up and put the fight back on their playing field.
Some strikers have made the transition and had good MMA careers, but in general trained grapplers (be it former championship/Olympic level amateur wrestlers, judo or jiujitsu practitioners) have tended to be the best MMA fighters. Most people just assumed that Holm had never fought a grappler on Rousey’s level and that she’d be unable to keep the fight from going to ground, where Rousey would have been expected to submit Holm quickly.
I hadn’t read 538’s analysis before the fight–but it does make a really good point about Rousey’s offense exposing her to strikes. That’s true, and I think the beating Rousey took shows that to a degree her style and success with it have been possible because she’s largely faced weak punchers. Holm isn’t Mike Tyson (no woman will ever have that kind of KO power) but any trained boxer is going to be able to do a lot of damage with punches, even ones not known for being knock out specialists (i.e. I still wouldn’t want Floyd Mayweather to punch me in the face even though he’s not known as a dominating puncher, he wins by outboxing and playing defense), and Holm showed that Rousey simply isn’t able to take punches delivered expertly.
Looking at the fight.
- She was being hit hard
- Her hits were having no effect.
Which means that she was at an extreme disadvantage, boxers know how to hit, take a hit and read hits, she was taking full blows to the face and body, and here attacks were easily read.
Should have taken it to the mat.
This is why IMO the pugilists are about the only martial artists who do well in street fights.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight - not being a fan of anything except unexpected outcomes - but 538 did a good job with showing that statistically Holm was a great matchup for Rousey.
Rousey goes for the takedown 8 times per fight while Holm’s takedown defense rating is 100%. Woof, that’s removing Rousey’s game.
And while the punching might be Holm’s thing, that kick ended up perfectly placed. It landed right under the right jawline in just the spot to send Rousey down. I don’t think anyone at all would have stayed standing after that shot. Really a perfect kick.
That’s something I’d like to ask. Was Rousey fighting the wrong fight, or, was she just not allowed to fight her fight? I really don’t know much about the sport other than Rousey being known as a “grappler”.
Remember Holm was a world boxing champion but was also a professional kickboxer too (she’s won an amateur championship in kickboxing), that wasn’t her first rodeo with regards to kicking someone’s head off.
Normally Rousey basically is like a charging bull, she rushes in and takes people down aggressively using her high level of skill there and then submits them. On the mat you’re in her world, and she is great at getting her opponents into the armbar. Part of that offense is predicated on the fact she’ll get hit a few times while executing it, but she has never had a problem taking a few hits before.
Possibly because her and her trainer were worried about Holm’s striking ability, she doesn’t do that in the beginning of this fight. Instead for awhile she basically boxes Holm. I can’t say I understand the strategy, because I don’t think Holly could KO Ronda very quickly if Ronda charged h er. Holm counterpunches repeatedly and Rousey, looks ineffective with any blows she lands, Rousey is already visibly hurt by one minute into the fight, and Holly isn’t.
All I can speculate on is maybe Ronda’s game plan was to catch Holly trying to land a big kick (which naturally puts you off balance and vulnerable) and wanted to use that as her moment to take her down and take control of the fight. Instead, Ronda does clinch her once earlier in Round 1 and take her down fully a minute or so later after the clinch breaks, but Holm was able to play defense and get back up.
There’s really no moment when the two fighters are vertical where Ronda looks anything but 100% outmanned, she even lands a few clean punches on Holly and it legitimately has no effect whatsoever, whereas Holly staggers her several times and clearly inflicts a lot of pain.
By round two Rousey is too beaten to fight effectively. She basically got beat up in Round 1 and couldn’t recover.
If they have a rematch I don’t know that Rousey can win, because Holly has shown she can avoid being taken down pretty well, and that she isn’t totally defenseless on the mat, either. When Ronda took her down in Round 1 that should’ve been the fight, but it wasn’t. If Ronda can’t beat her quickly with a submission on the mat, then she probably can’t beat Holly period.
I haven’t seen it yet, though I do know the result. I’m guessing there were two factors at play here. First, Ronda has been spending a lot of time being a celebrity lately when she should have been focused on the fight. Second, she imagined herself an expert puncher when she was really just a beginner. Her skill was in grappling and submission holds, punching and kicking aren’t skills you just pick up along the way. I expected her to win anyway so I didn’t bother watching the fight, should have seen this coming. The rematch will be huge though, both these women have the chance for an unbelievable payday if they know how to negotiate.
Ronda needs to work on her conditioning. I was frankly shocked to see her sucking wind by the end of Round 1. All her fights have been short, but my assumption is she trains expecting any fight to go 5 rounds so that she has the cardio to go the distance–but she doesn’t. She was sucking wind big time and Holly never even looked remotely tired, Holly was in tremendously better athletic shape than Ronda.
You saw the same thing in the Tate fight that went past round one; Rousey has no stamina because she’s never had to have stamina. I would have thought her coaches would have been pushing her on that considering how close she came to losing that fight, but apparently no one wants to tell Rousey that she has weaknesses.
Yeah, when her boxing trainer Ed Tarverdyan said a few days ago that he has confidence in Ronda’s striking ability against anyone (including) Holm, I just assumed that was typical pre-fight BS talk. But you have to wonder if maybe her team drinks the kool-aid (or is required to), and they were delusional enough to actually believe that.
Many a fighter has fallen into the hole of a string of short fights. There’s no training that prepares for a real fight that doesn’t end quickly. I’ll have to watch it, I want to see if Ronda even attempted to grapple with Holm. If her trainer was confident in her striking ability it wasn’t based on reality. I’ve seen her punch before, she’s not impressive and leaves herself wide open when she throws. I imagine Holm noticed that also.
She did try to grapple with her, mostly after she had already been punched to a pulp.
[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
I imagine this puts an end to fantasies of Rousey beating Floyd Mayweather.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah no kidding. Those hits that Holly provided are love taps compared to what Mayweather’s punches will be like.
She tried to grapple some, she clinched Holly against the cage once, took her down once, and I believe tried to take her down two other times unsuccessfully.
The Rousey camp (at least in the short quotes available on ESPN, have said the game plan was to clinch Holm against the cage and fight her there. This neutralizes her reach advantage and limits her ability to deliver punches, and would set her up for a take down, or at the very least if they kept taking her to the cage it’d wear Holm out. Fighting on the cage has been described as “extremely tiring” by other MMA fighters in various interviews and podcasts I listen to; but that being said any strategy that is based on Rousey tiring out Holm is probably a poor one at this point.
I do think if Rousey’s plan had executed appropriately it’d have ended up in an armbar–she almost got Holm in one as it is, I don’t think Rousey thought she was going to KO Holm. When they have the rematch Rousey needs to not try to outbox Holm at all, and go way more to the take down. Holm has never submitted anyone, and while she’s proven she can survive on the mat, I don’t believe she has the submission or grappling skills to win there. That being said, Ronda is a very strong judoka and great at taking people down and submitting them, and she struggled all but once trying to take Holm down. It’s possible Holm may just be better than her and Ronda isn’t able to beat her in a fight.