Half of UFC Fights Should be Draws

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WEWEREONABREAK

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If the fight is boring and uneventful, nobody should win. If the fight is exciting and competitive, nobody should lose. If the fight is fairly even, why declare a winner?

The difference between being edged out and dominated is not properly reflected in the results, both of which appear as "Decision (Unanimous)".

Shouldn't a fighter have to finish his opponent or establish a clear margin of superiority to be granted a victory?

A good example, perhaps, is the Felder v Barboza fight that just happened. Did anyone lose that fight? I mean really lose enough to deserve a loss?

I feel like 2 ten minute rounds, with 3 minutes rest between rounds, would be better.
 

Andrewsimar Palhardass

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Jan 8, 2016
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I agree solely when it comes to competition, but it's a sport-killing idea. You can't have a sport that is built for entertainment, where half of the matches don't have definitive results. If you think promotions have a hard enough time hyping matchups nowadays, imagine trying to do it while everyone knows that there is a very good chance that it results in a tie.
 

Filthy

Iowa Wrestling Champion
Jun 28, 2016
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I agree solely when it comes to competition, but it's a sport-killing idea. You can't have a sport that is built for entertainment, where half of the matches don't have definitive results. If you think promotions have a hard enough time hyping matchups nowadays, imagine trying to do it while everyone knows that there is a very good chance that it results in a tie.
I think the only real reason to have a 'declared' winner is for betting.
 

Andrewsimar Palhardass

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How about this-
The fighters both have to do an obstacle course between the weigh in and the fight. This also includes an IQ test. After the fight, they do the same course again, and whoever has regressed the most compared to their first try loses the fight. Fun way to show who took more damage.
 

Andrewsimar Palhardass

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I think the only real reason to have a 'declared' winner is for betting.
Betting has a lot to do with it, but I guarantee you that many fewer people would watch if there were that many draws. Have you ever been around people when a fight gets scored a draw? Hardcore fans usually get it but even they're disappointed. Everyone else groans as if the fight had never happened and they were robbed of their entertainment. People genuinely hate ties. They hate ties so much that the MLB All Star game was changed to where it would decide home field advantage in the World Series because of a tie. They had to make the game matter so they'd have an excuse to play as many innings as were needed to avoid a tie. It's just how fandom works.
 

Judobill

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Betting has a lot to do with it, but I guarantee you that many fewer people would watch if there were that many draws. Have you ever been around people when a fight gets scored a draw? Hardcore fans usually get it but even they're disappointed. Everyone else groans as if the fight had never happened and they were robbed of their entertainment. People genuinely hate ties. They hate ties so much that the MLB All Star game was changed to where it would decide home field advantage in the World Series because of a tie. They had to make the game matter so they'd have an excuse to play as many innings as were needed to avoid a tie. It's just how fandom works.
You ever look at the betting lines for draws?
 

Star-Lord

Saving the Universe one Fight at a Time
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Jan 23, 2015
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I like this idea. It's the same thing I see in grappling. I get for a tournaments purpose there should be a winner. But for one off fights or matches. No finish, no win. But I agree, nobody wants to see a draw that's a casual fan.
 

jason73

Yuri Bezmenov was right
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A finish bonus would help put an end to the boring sparring match style fights.give guys some incentive to do more than the bare minimum to slightly out point the opponent
 
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1031

Guest
Even though I agree with the OP, some people have made good points why it's not a great idea.
Still, there must be a way to decide a "clearer" winner most of the time. I mean, it's a fight ffs.
A ten minute round followed by two 5 minute rounds would do the trick imo.
 
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Rambo John J

Eats things that would make a Billy Goat Puke
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when we look at a fighters record and see a bunch of decision victories what do we think...

-seems kinda boring?will I be entertained?
-are those decisions all actually indicative of who "won" the fight?
-This guy isn't a finisher

from a purists perspective the fights that are finished mean a whole lot more than the ones that are judged by 3 older people who probably never competed in MMA or combat sports

Finishes tell the tale of MMA
Decisions do not


Betting and viewers want a "winner", but that is just mental masturbation...you don't actually defeat somebody by doing 51% of the effective fighting.

Fighters with high finish rates...Fighters with high finish or be finished rates
^^These are the fighters that move the needle and are a must see
 

Rambo John J

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I must add that some decisions are indeed beatings and one sided...fairly rare though
Some guys seem to be content toying with their opponents, coasting if you will
Taking less damage not going for a finish is often the motive

sometimes that backfires and you lose a decision that you thought was easily yours
AKA Masvidal vs Al Laquinta
 

WEWEREONABREAK

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A finish bonus would help put an end to the boring sparring match style fights.give guys some incentive to do more than the bare minimum to slightly out point the opponent
Good point and it might but it seems that decision fights that are caused by lack of risk-taking are largely motivated by a desire on the part of the fighter in question not to lose. Thus, any bonus would have to outweigh the career setback of a loss in order to have any effect. Currently, that bonus is set to 50,000$ and it has proved to be insufficient.
 

kneeblock

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Apr 18, 2015
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This idea of fighters not taking enough risks is just crazy to me and I honestly can't believe so many fans of the sport subscribe to it. I've said this before, but fighting is first and foremost a job for most of the people we root for. It's a job that carries a substantial amount of risk. Losing means you might lose your job. Getting wild means you might get injured and not be able to fight for awhile or that you might suffer longer term damage that you'll pay a major price for down the road. If you want to criticize fighters lack of willingness to expose themselves to that kind of risk, you're basically micromanaging how they do their job. Also, the technical level in MMA today is so high that some style and strategy matchups just don't produce slobberknockers.

I think the idea of fights needing to end in finishes or be "exciting" comes from 3 related factors.

1) Propaganda from early NHB that promised it would be a fight to the finish. Mostly this materialized because the early UFCs were squash matches with hand selected opponents that Royce easily finished. The first time there was actually a skill equilibrium, we were treated to one of the most boring matches of all time in Royce vs Shamrock. This was followed by the equally awful Shamrock vs. Taktarov, Taktarov vs. Ruas and of course Lewis vs. Carlson Gracie Jr. In fact, other than a handful of fights, most early UFC, Pride, Pancrase, and RINGS fights are unwatchable by today's standards. Once you had actual athletes with similar skill sets competing, snoozers ending in decisions were the default. Just thinking about Renzo vs Otsuka, Ito vs Inagaki or any fight involving Pat Miletich makes me want to take a nap. If we tabulated every fight in MMA history, we'd see finishes are the exception rather than the rule, particularly after 1995.

2) Lack of technical sophistication on the part of fans. This is sort of controversial because after all, it's supposed to be entertainment, so is it really on us as fans to know more or is it up to matchmakers and fighters to give us their most exciting show possible? In my view, few fighters go out and say "I'm going to do the least amount possible to just get a win." Few, if any, fighters train like this. In fact, it's very difficult to. Anyone who's ever trained in any combat sport or who's ever trained anyone knows you come up with a game plan to exploit your opponent's weakness and if the finish is there, you go for it. Sometimes we at home see openings fighters don't see or that they're too tired to jump on or that seem riskier from their point of view. There are definite cases where fighters will "play it safe," the best example maybe being Shogun vs. Machida 1 and some of Jones recent fights, but sometimes trainers and fighters have particular goals in fights where they want to focus on one particular strategy and impose it and it doesn't always go as planned. You can say they should get all of that done in sparring, but that's just not always possible. In boxing, fans came to accept this truth a long time ago and arguably it's made the sport more insular and niche, but not much more than soccer or hockey or for that matter American football. In the NBA the Pistons and Spurs used to be ruthlessly criticized for their style of play, and you could argue it led to rule changes to speed the game up and incentivize long ball. In MMA that's less possible because athletic commissions rather than promoters control the ruleset. Fans need to grow up. The worst fighter on the UFC roster today could likely dismantle several of the top fighters of 15 years ago in their prime because they have better technique on the feet and the ground, defensively and offensively. The boxing technique is still fairly primitive, but has improved by leaps and bounds today and is one of the reasons fights can sometimes be boring. People actually know how to not get hit much better than they used to.

3) Fans don't appreciate how bad the labor situation is for fighters. It should be said that nowhere in a fighter contract does it say they have to meet some arbitrary definition of exciting. It says they have to make weight, will be offered X number of fights for X amount of dollars and can be cut at any time for any reason, but can't leave of their own accord. Also, their likeness rights are gone forever and they can't have sponsors of their choosing. They are also prohibited from organizing to contest these rights based on the current position of the National Labor Relations Board, a position further complicated by the current US government's disposition toward foreign workers. You just can't "go out on your shield" because you never know if it's going to be the pretense for not having you come back. It's why in post-fight interviews you see that fighters take little solace in being told what a war they were in because losing sucks and could mean the difference between being able to pay the bills for the year. The UFC has tried incentivizing excitement with performance bonuses, but what happens if you're giving it your all against Kalib Starnes or a guy who's taking you down when you look best on your feet? Fighters can't control how exciting it is unless they script it and no one wants that.

In my view, if we want to do away with decisions and lessen the odds of boring fights, we should be advocating for more job stability, better pay, lifelong high quality health coverage and thoughtful rule changes at the athletic commission level that could pick things up a bit. More draws are probably a nonstarter because of all the reasons chronicled, but less punitive measures for losses would likely make people more open to experimenting occasionally. We as fans have to accept that this is no longer fighting or even the closest thing to it, if it ever was. It's a pro sport and finishes are one part of it, but they're the equivalent of a home run or a hat trick unless the matchmaker is a sadist. We're lucky we get them at all.
 

D241

Banned
Jan 14, 2015
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You had my "winner" emoticon vote when I read the thread title.

This thread and the context of it gives me a raging boner.


Continue everyone, please, continue......
 

D241

Banned
Jan 14, 2015
4,384
4,741
Six years ago I created a thread about how every UFC fight card had at least one fight that should/could be a draw outcome.

I started tracking it six years ago and it became so consistent, I eventually no longer felt the need to track it as the statistics were already there-

Fights that should be a draw per card


And yes OP, Barboza vs Felder absolutely should have been a draw, including their first bout.

When you see the rare come from behind victories, the Tim Boetsch vs Yushin Okami, the Mike Russow vs Todd Duffee, Bigfoot vs Overeem, Anderson vs Chael 1, you understand that sometimes a fighter has momentum, but that by no means does that equate to the other fighter being broken.

Where there's a will, there's a way. A professional fighter, has significant toughness in addition to fighting skills. Fights that don't end in a finish, will always leave doubt of "what if". What if there was more time, could the opponent on the bad side of momentum re-establish momentum?

If you have 10 decision wins, run those 10 fights longer, and you will be surprised that some of the guys will come from behind to get the victory.
 

WEWEREONABREAK

First 100
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Jan 16, 2015
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This idea of fighters not taking enough risks is just crazy to me and I honestly can't believe so many fans of the sport subscribe to it. I've said this before, but fighting is first and foremost a job for most of the people we root for. It's a job that carries a substantial amount of risk. Losing means you might lose your job. Getting wild means you might get injured and not be able to fight for awhile or that you might suffer longer term damage that you'll pay a major price for down the road. If you want to criticize fighters lack of willingness to expose themselves to that kind of risk, you're basically micromanaging how they do their job. Also, the technical level in MMA today is so high that some style and strategy matchups just don't produce slobberknockers.

I think the idea of fights needing to end in finishes or be "exciting" comes from 3 related factors.

1) Propaganda from early NHB that promised it would be a fight to the finish. Mostly this materialized because the early UFCs were squash matches with hand selected opponents that Royce easily finished. The first time there was actually a skill equilibrium, we were treated to one of the most boring matches of all time in Royce vs Shamrock. This was followed by the equally awful Shamrock vs. Taktarov, Taktarov vs. Ruas and of course Lewis vs. Carlson Gracie Jr. In fact, other than a handful of fights, most early UFC, Pride, Pancrase, and RINGS fights are unwatchable by today's standards. Once you had actual athletes with similar skill sets competing, snoozers ending in decisions were the default. Just thinking about Renzo vs Otsuka, Ito vs Inagaki or any fight involving Pat Miletich makes me want to take a nap. If we tabulated every fight in MMA history, we'd see finishes are the exception rather than the rule, particularly after 1995.

2) Lack of technical sophistication on the part of fans. This is sort of controversial because after all, it's supposed to be entertainment, so is it really on us as fans to know more or is it up to matchmakers and fighters to give us their most exciting show possible? In my view, few fighters go out and say "I'm going to do the least amount possible to just get a win." Few, if any, fighters train like this. In fact, it's very difficult to. Anyone who's ever trained in any combat sport or who's ever trained anyone knows you come up with a game plan to exploit your opponent's weakness and if the finish is there, you go for it. Sometimes we at home see openings fighters don't see or that they're too tired to jump on or that seem riskier from their point of view. There are definite cases where fighters will "play it safe," the best example maybe being Shogun vs. Machida 1 and some of Jones recent fights, but sometimes trainers and fighters have particular goals in fights where they want to focus on one particular strategy and impose it and it doesn't always go as planned. You can say they should get all of that done in sparring, but that's just not always possible. In boxing, fans came to accept this truth a long time ago and arguably it's made the sport more insular and niche, but not much more than soccer or hockey or for that matter American football. In the NBA the Pistons and Spurs used to be ruthlessly criticized for their style of play, and you could argue it led to rule changes to speed the game up and incentivize long ball. In MMA that's less possible because athletic commissions rather than promoters control the ruleset. Fans need to grow up. The worst fighter on the UFC roster today could likely dismantle several of the top fighters of 15 years ago in their prime because they have better technique on the feet and the ground, defensively and offensively. The boxing technique is still fairly primitive, but has improved by leaps and bounds today and is one of the reasons fights can sometimes be boring. People actually know how to not get hit much better than they used to.

3) Fans don't appreciate how bad the labor situation is for fighters. It should be said that nowhere in a fighter contract does it say they have to meet some arbitrary definition of exciting. It says they have to make weight, will be offered X number of fights for X amount of dollars and can be cut at any time for any reason, but can't leave of their own accord. Also, their likeness rights are gone forever and they can't have sponsors of their choosing. They are also prohibited from organizing to contest these rights based on the current position of the National Labor Relations Board, a position further complicated by the current US government's disposition toward foreign workers. You just can't "go out on your shield" because you never know if it's going to be the pretense for not having you come back. It's why in post-fight interviews you see that fighters take little solace in being told what a war they were in because losing sucks and could mean the difference between being able to pay the bills for the year. The UFC has tried incentivizing excitement with performance bonuses, but what happens if you're giving it your all against Kalib Starnes or a guy who's taking you down when you look best on your feet? Fighters can't control how exciting it is unless they script it and no one wants that.

In my view, if we want to do away with decisions and lessen the odds of boring fights, we should be advocating for more job stability, better pay, lifelong high quality health coverage and thoughtful rule changes at the athletic commission level that could pick things up a bit. More draws are probably a nonstarter because of all the reasons chronicled, but less punitive measures for losses would likely make people more open to experimenting occasionally. We as fans have to accept that this is no longer fighting or even the closest thing to it, if it ever was. It's a pro sport and finishes are one part of it, but they're the equivalent of a home run or a hat trick unless the matchmaker is a sadist. We're lucky we get them at all.
I'm sorry but it's a spectator sport. The people watching get a say too, otherwise it's just two guys fighting in a warehouse.

And I don't think appeals to support for labor work in this situation. Fighting is not like coal-mining or factory work. It's not a job people do because they can't do anything else. It's the pursuit of a rather large dream. And dreams don't come true for everybody.

Take care of people who put their health on the line for out entertainment, absolutely. But not at the cost of the way the audience wants to consume the spectacle.
 

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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I'm sorry but it's a spectator sport. The people watching get a say too, otherwise it's just two guys fighting in a warehouse.

And I don't think appeals to support for labor work in this situation. Fighting is not like coal-mining or factory work. It's not a job people do because they can't do anything else. It's the pursuit of a rather large dream. And dreams don't come true for everybody.

Take care of people who put their health on the line for out entertainment, absolutely. But not at the cost of the way the audience wants to consume the spectacle.
The idea that fighting is a dream and not labor is the exact rationale any boss can use to say "hey, this is your dream job so be grateful!" When you're the one giving value to the company, you deserve labor rights, no matter how much you like your job. No one would tell the old Baltimore Ravens that using defense to win the Superbowl means they should be kicked out of the NFL, especially if they win. You just can't ever leave the amount of risk a worker reasonably employs to get their job done successfully in the hands of management or customers. That's not only immoral, but against most codes and customs in entertainment and actual workplace safety laws. The only reason such things are skirted now is because of fighters dubious independent contractor status and lack of ability to collectively bargain. If we as fans ever want a mature professional sport, we're going to have to deal with some trade offs.
 

WEWEREONABREAK

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The idea that fighting is a dream and not labor is the exact rationale any boss can use to say "hey, this is your dream job so be grateful!" When you're the one giving value to the company, you deserve labor rights, no matter how much you like your job. No one would tell the old Baltimore Ravens that using defense to win the Superbowl means they should be kicked out of the NFL, especially if they win. You just can't ever leave the amount of risk a worker reasonably employs to get their job done successfully in the hands of management or customers. That's not only immoral, but against most codes and customs in entertainment and actual workplace safety laws. The only reason such things are skirted now is because of fighters dubious independent contractor status and lack of ability to collectively bargain. If we as fans ever want a mature professional sport, we're going to have to deal with some trade offs.
I agree that fighters should be treated better but the relationship is a 2-way street. They're not exercising their right to make money through fighting, they're given the opportunity to make money by virtue of the fact that we watch them when they do it.

It's a delicate balance to strike, not all or nothing. I don't want to give them impression that I'm a corporate guy. I abhor modern corporate behavior with respect to employee treatment. But it's a fact of life that greater rewards carry greater risks.

As far as football goes, it's not a great analogy. Football games have 11 minutes of action. Obviously, their fans like watching men stand around. ;)