never trained but from what I've seen, ring works better when soccer kicks are allowed. In OneFC it's only a question of time till someone gets stuck against the cage and fucked up bad.
Elite fighters don't have issues with wall 'n stall tho, over the years I've come to appreciate the cage.
What I think we should focus on is cage size vs weight class. A collapsible Octagon would be very cool.
See Jack Slack's idea:
http://fightland.vice.com/blog/the-b...ld-upside-down
Adjust Cage Size to Weight Class
Earlier this year, I swore off watching Floyd Mayweather's fights live, and promised that I'd only catch up on them if I had heard it was a great fight. Why? Because much of Mayweather's game these days is won in the negotiations. He says he wants a twenty-six foot ring, and his opponent decides how badly they need to get paid.
Welterweights running around a twenty-six foot ring, when the classic Queensbury rules allowed
heavyweights up to a twenty-foot ring, are just tedious and frustrating to watch. Mayweather simply got on his bike in his rematch with Maidana, and tied up whenever he couldn't get away in time.
When the WEC lightweights came over to the UFC, there was a great deal of speculating over why finishing rates dropped and formerly exciting fighters became less interesting. One of the most significant changes between the WEC and the UFC was the
much, much larger cage that the UFC used for its events. A bigger cage means a larger amount of space available away from the “danger zone†along the fence. A fighter can often comfortably run around the octagon without any chance of his opponent cutting him off—just watch Starnes versus Quarry.
Notice that Starnes only hits the fence when he stops to flip off Quarry. He managed to run all night on a reportedly broken foot.
Yes cutting off the cage is an important and under practiced skill, but every attempt to cut off the cage is an effort, and not all of them work even in a small, square ring. In a gigantic, near circular cage, your chances of forcing action against a tentative opponent are significantly reduced.
But more than that—the cage is a surface to bridge off of and work your back up against. If you're a six-foot heavyweight getting taken down, you have a much better chance of being within shrimping distance of the fence than a five foot three flyweight. Hemingway's remarks about everyone being the same size lying down do not apply to ground fighting.
In this day and age, it cannot be impossible to create an octagon which can quickly have the fence panels either shifted or removed and replaced with smaller, closer in ones. The grounding points for the smaller fence could easily be covered with matting and canvas when the light heavyweights and heavyweights came out, after all.
Alternate Future: With the UFC struggling to get anyone to care about flyweight bouts, John Lineker is one of the few guys who cuts off the cage well anyway. In a cage more suited to his size, he could be a terrific draw.
