I should clarify–in terms of scoring, Ronda never took Holm down, she tried once and failed. Ronda was able to take the fight to ground briefly (this is when she tried to armbar Holm), but it wasn’t an actual take down. Holm was credited with one take down, she actually lifted Rousey and threw her down similar to an amateur wrestling suplex at one point. She didn’t stay down long afterward though.
I think talk of style/ability aside, the biggest single factor is Rousey clearly doesn’t know how to plan out a fight strategically and execute that plan. Holm does, and that’s how she’s won all of her fights. I think a lot of us (myself included) have been blinded by Ronda being so much better than the other women she’s fought in terms of ability, judo skills etc that this hasn’t been a factor before, and maybe to a degree I viewed the Tate fights as aberrations when really they weren’t.
When Rousey’s plan wasn’t working they obviously had nothing gamed out in terms of how to get back on plan or how to adjust, instead she just got desperate. She threw several hilarious wild punches–not sure if she thought she was going to KO Holm with a wild haymaker or what–that Holm probably considered laughing at mid-fight they were so amateurish and poorly thrown.
Edit to add: It’s also worth noting that clinching Holly on the cage is a bad strategy and Ronda shouldn’t try it again. On the cage Holly is still a much better striker, she was able to punch Rousey several times while clinched, and fairly effectively.
FightMetric shows just how poor of a striker Ronda is, Ronda threw 12 more strikes than Holm and connected 21 fewer times than Holly did. Holly connected with 38/53 vs Ronda’s 17/65.
Even knowing she was susceptible to punchers I was blinded as well. I assumed Ronda would be ready by now for an opponent who would avoid the armbar by developing other submission holds. As I said above, Ronda was clearly not as good a puncher as was being promoted, I guess it just seemed like she was too good. I called some big upsets in boxing ahead of time, and MMA provides more opportunities than boxing to dethrone a champion.
Color me embarrassed for not seeing this loss as a greater probability. Luckily I don’t bet on sports. Recalling a recent thread I’ll offer this:
If they setup a rematch for say, UFC 200, and Ronda actually spends the next 8 months training MMA, and training what she needs to train, I’d still bet on her to win. Things she needs to work on imo: cutting off the cage, patience, double leg taketowns and transitions from guard. I think MMA history has shown that you don’t need to, and she doesn’t need to, be able to outbox Holly to win, just not come right freaking straight in and be able to takedown from longer range.
Of course, what I expect her to do is screw around and make movies before getting serious again, and if she does that I have no idea if she wins. She still has a chance I think, even that fight, if they fought it again she wins a 2 or 3 times out of 10, she got one chance at an armbar and she doesn’t miss those that often.
Looks like Ronda knew what to expect, so I’m surprised she didn’t adopt a smarter approach in light of her analysis of Holm’s style. She just tried to bull her way in like always and played right into Holly Holm’s hands. Literally.
Yeah, in retrospect I think you’re right. I was a little hasty in my condemnation of the ref last night and your points are well taken. Plus I don’t really follow MMA fights much and was unaware of the ref’s reputation. I appreciate your insight.
I’m not. She’s said before that she goes for the fast fight. She even said that, if she stops being able to do a fast fight, she’ll quit, so her brain won’t take too much damage.
I’m surprised she didn’t seem to have a back up plan at all–after that analysis she made of her–but not that she’s not conditioned for long fights.
The truth is that Ronda Rousey was built up into being some sort of juggernaut that she really wasn’t, or at least that we could not reliably know her to be.
As popular as MMA has become it is easy to forget that women’s MMA, especially, is a sport that has barely gotten off the ground and has a very limited talent pool. It’s sort of like what baseball was in, I dunno, 1872. If you found a newspaper clipping from then saying some barnstorming team had beaten a professional team that wouldn’t really be a huge shock, 'cause hey, they barely had things organized in 1872. Shit, people from west of the Mississippi were barely a part of “major league” baseball. But it would be preposterous to suggest a semipro touring team could beat the Kansas City Royals in 2015. They would be lucky to lose by less than 20 runs if the Royals were trying. Women’s MMA is now where pro baseball was in 1872.
So the fact that Ronda Rousey beat the living shit out of twelve women up to this point is, to be honest, a statistically dubious dataset, and it’s really not THAT much of a surprise that Holly Holm knocked her into next week. There just wasn’t a great deal of evidence that Rousey was all that unstoppable. Within the next three years, if MMA remains popular and keeps growing in terms of its talent base, half a dozen women who could punch Holly Holm’s teeth into the tenth row will make their way up the meritocracy, assuming the UFC program allows itself to be that.
This is a reflection of the thin talent pool in UFC. MMA is certainly coming on strong, but it’s got a dearth of established stars, not to slight Ronda and the women’s division at all, but at least part of the reason she and it have gotten so much attention as of late has been the very poor depth in the men’s division. Aside from Conor there aren’t very many popular, top drawing male fighters. John Jones was there a couple years ago but his career has now derailed with personal incidents (drugs.)
If you look at some of the more “seasoned” UFC fighters, say the guys I just mentioned: Conor McGregor, John Jones, add maybe Daniel Cormier in there, all of them have roughly the same amount of experience–18 fights for Daniel and Conor and 22 for Jones. These are considered the more seasoned people at the top level of the sport. There are older guys out there still like Josh Barnett or Roy Nelson who have more fights under their belt, but both of them are not seen as competitive at the top levels of the sport any longer.
For this reason it starts to make sense that a dominant fighter like Ronda who had 12 wins would be such a star. I’m not sure if it’s just the relative newness of the sport, or if the fighters just tend to not stay in it as long, or tend to not fight as many fights, but 12 fights or so kinda makes you “established” in UFC. It’s definitely very different from boxing, I remember back to the 80s, Tyson had something like 20 knockouts before he was getting serious buzz, and he didn’t have his first championship fight with Berbick until he had like 28 wins under his belt. In MMA there just aren’t that number of fights being done by the top people, so it’s been kinda the thing where someone can win a (relatively) small handful of fights and suddenly is a big star. Then they lose one or two and that essentially ends their career, they may stay around fighting lower tier fights for awhile, but some don’t.
Well, and Holm is much more experienced. Judo is a great sport I have a lot of respect for, but Olympic style judo matches aren’t really the same animal as a true combat/contact sport fight like a boxing match, kickboxing match, or an MMA fight. Ronda was able to translate her high level of judo skill to MMA, but it required a lot of training to build other skills as well–and at the end of the day while she was an experienced martial artist before her first fight she wasn’t an experienced fighter.
Holm had 38 professional boxing bouts in her career, 9 professional MMA fights (and in those 9 fights she had more collective time in the cage than Ronda had in her 12 fights prior to losing to Holm), and Holm also had a few professional kickboxing matches, not to mention amateur boxing and kickboxing. Those are all “real fights”, no boxer is going to win a high level MMA match with pure boxing, so I’m not saying the skills are directly translated, but the “fight experience” is. There’s a real experience factor to being in real fights that can’t just be summoned out of thin air, Holm has a lot of it, Ronda actually doesn’t.
Holm is also like 6 years older, so she’s had a lot longer time to get more fighting experience.
I do disagree we’ll see an MMA fighter that can “knock Holly’s teeth in”, most aspiring MMA types who didn’t already go down the boxing path first tend to focus most heavily on wrestling and grappling skills, submissions, and light striking training. Most of the strikers in MMA are people who first developed a skill set in a striking sport and then transferred over to MMA. If MMA becomes more popular I think you’ll instead see future generation Holly Holm types going straight into MMA, they won’t have a 10+ year boxing career first. So to me, a fighter with 33 wins in boxing, I doubt MMA is going in the direction of getting better strikers than that. If anything I see it going in the other direction. But as you’ve seen from the men’s division the best strikers largely cannot compete at the top levels with the best grapplers. Ronda just didn’t have the skill set or the training/prep necessary to take Holly to the mat and keep her there where she would’ve won. The answer to Holly is better takedowns and grappling, not better boxing.
Didn’t Holm push her fist into Rousey’s face at the weigh in? That’s as far as I know of the backstory between these two. If so, Rousey was justified in being upset. I’m kind of annoyed now because it seems to be almost 90/10 people happy that Rousey lost. I like Rousey and I don’t really get the hate for her.
To be frank I believe UFC “stare down” and “weigh in” drama is sports entertainment. I think it’s 100% staged/fake. Ronda specifically is a huge pro wrestling fan and I think a lot of her behaviors are just geared to generate attention–she’s borrowing from Ali’s playbook (and he himself got the idea to act like a heel from pro wrestling) to make money. Dana White loves this stuff.
Right. There was no way to tell from her competition just how good she was. Even now we don’t know if she simply made a mistake by trying to duke it out with Holly Holm or if she could not have won had she concentrated on grappling.
My take on the fight was that Rousey got her bell rung early by failing to slip a hard Holm punch and never recovered. Analysis after that early punch is moot, since she was in constant recovery at that point. If Rousey could have slipped the early couple of punches, it would have been very competitive. Instead we just got a dazed Rousey staggering into punch after punch after punch. I’m honestly surprised she kept her feet as long as she did.
Avoiding punches and counter punching toe to toe with a professional boxer is a skill that takes years and years to learn. Most good professional boxers start going to a boxing gym in mid-early teens. It doesn’t make sense to even be going down that route in MMA which isn’t restricted to boxing rules when you have a strong skillset in other aspects of sports combat fighting.
I just read that Rousey’s boxing coach says he doesn’t think Holm was getting the upper hand in the boxing/striking, and that the knock out came out of nowhere. That to me would be when I, if I was Rousey, fired him and hired a new coach. He’s delusional and that’s not something you need in a coach. Your boxing coach needs to be giving you reality based training, not fantasy.
