The Bottom Line: In MMA, Easy Solutions are Usually Illusory

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The conclusion to the Chris Weidman-Gegard Mousasi co-main event at UFC 210 on Saturday was a complete mess. Weidman was struck with what appeared to be illegal blows and given time to recover. Instant replay, despite not being a part of New York’s MMA rules, demonstrated the blows were legal as Weidman got an extended respite from a bad situation. Finally, the fight was just stopped, much to the chagrin of everyone involved, including Mousasi. It was an exceedingly disappointing conclusion to what was a terrific fight on paper.

As this sequence was going down, a wide variety of scapegoats started emerging. Dominick Cruz blamed the doctors for stopping the fight. Others targeted referee Dan Miragliotta for missing the original call and then asking for instant replay when that was not allowed under the rules. That led to criticism of the instant replay rule itself. The New York commission was blamed for its handling of the situation. It felt like the Ultimate Fighting Championship was back at Madison Square Garden; fingers were being pointed in more directions than in the aftermath of the latest Knicks loss.

In MMA, it feels like people are always peddling easy answers for whatever problems exist in the sport. Perhaps it’s because the sport is young, so it feels like change is easier to enact and endemic problems are seen as more rectifiable than they are. Perhaps an individual sport built on imposing one’s will on an opponent tends to attract people who think that you can just bend a sport into functioning perfectly if you know what you’re doing. Whatever the reasons, it’s frustrating how little appreciation there seems to be for what a difficult sport MMA is to govern.

MMA at its creation was designed conceptually to prove who would win in a real, no-rules fight. However, that vision had to be compromised pretty much from the beginning. Certain techniques were too brutal to sell even if they worked. Time limits fundamentally altered everything about the competition but were obviously needed in order to make it work as a spectator sport. MMA was an imperfect compromise from its inception.

Implementing rules presents even more problems for MMA. Unlike some sports which have set plays after which there is time to review what happened, MMA just keeps going. Unlike sports which are guaranteed to last a certain amount of time, before overtime, MMA bouts can end at any time. The slightest mistake can undo everything that came before. Any stop in the action to try to enforce the rules changes the nature of the fight in a way that is fundamentally different than throwing a flag in football and making a call at the end of the play. A stop in the action is called because one fighter is at a disadvantage, and if that stoppage was called for the wrong reasons, you can’t easily put the genie back in the bottle. It’s not fair to the person who did not commit a foul.

As terrible as the situation was, the unfortunate truth is that there was no perfect solution for the dilemma presented by the Mousasi-Weidman fight in Buffalo, New York. The blows by Mousasi looked illegal as they happened and the referee needs to be able to intervene on those sorts of judgment calls. Once he made that errant but understandable call, there was no fixing the situation.

Without instant replay, Weidman would be given time to recover from legal blows that had him in major trouble. If Weidman couldn’t continue, he would be ruled the winner by disqualification, a patently unfair result. That could be overturned later by the commission, but even then, it would be a no-contest. That’s hardly fair to Mousasi, who had Weidman rocked and was in great position to win the fight.

What if instant replay were in place? Well, that presents a whole set of new problems. First, the referee would need to conclusively decide if it was a legal blow. That took plenty of time at UFC 210, providing Weidman with an extended break he didn’t deserve. At the point it was decided the blow was legal, there would be two choices. Neither of those choices is desirable.

First, the fight could be ruled a TKO, which is what happened. Weidman was hurt when the fight was stopped improperly. There aren’t timeouts in a fight, and Weidman didn’t appear to be in a great position to fight at the time of the call. The problem with that is that Weidman should have at least been given the opportunity to try to continue, and ruling it a TKO deprived him of that opportunity.

The second option is that the fight would continue. This is a terribly flawed choice, as well. Weidman would receive an extended break to recover when he was trying to make Mousasi’s blows illegal but did not succeed. Moreover, you would be allowing a potentially concussed fighter an opportunity to recover and then go out for more potential punishment. One of MMA’s best safety features relative to other combat sports is fighters are less likely to take multiple concussions on the same night.

Some of these options probably strike you as better than others. The goal of commissions should be to choose the best possible option. The issue is that so often it feels like there is no acknowledgement that these choices in MMA are difficult. The current rules are simply mocked as stupid and easy solutions are peddled, which then opens up all sorts of new problems.

This pattern has been particularly striking when it comes to cutting weight. Weight cutting is a complex problem, but many seem to view it as easy. New rules were implemented for weigh-ins, and lo and behold, it backfired. More fighters were missing weight and having to pull out late with serious health issues. The law of unintended consequences is completely disregarded.

This is not an argument against trying to make positive changes in MMA. There is certainly still low-hanging fruit to be had when it comes to improving the way the sport is governed. However, a little bit of humility in calling for change would go a long way. Sometimes, it’s just going to be a matter of picking the best choice out of a number of undesirable options. Weidman-Mousasi was deeply frustrating, but that doesn’t mean there is an easy way to protect against something like that happening again.