Given the many many ways in which an MMA fighter can attack his opponent, the fights dont usually last very long and the lightly padded gloves mean a clean punch will usually KO the opponent and bring a decisive end to the fight. There are also the fights that end without a KO or any kind of shot to the head and are decided by a wrestling style submission.
Contrast this to boxing where the only method is to punch your opponent repeatedly and then look at the ridiculously oversized gloves they wear and then consider the prevalence of acute brain injuries and long term brain injuries in the sport.
Boxing is the sport that needs bringing up to date and the first step would be to reduce the padding in the gloves so fights are ended more quickly, 12 rounds of repeatedly being punched to the head inflicts the kind of damage that MMA has so far managed to avoid…although i will concede the sport is young and we may yet see the emergence of ‘punch drunk’ old MMA fighters….but i doubt it.
By all accounts when boxing was bare knuckle, head injuries were rare, of course the fighters would cut up more badly than they do now but the hand always breaks before the skull does….it was the sight of all the blood that offended Victorian sensibilites and led to the gloving up of fighters.
Since that moment KOs have been more difficult to come across and have required repeated blows to the head to achieve.
Its the same reason head injuries, concussions etc are more prevalent in American football than Rugby, with the ‘protection’ worn in American football they go for each others heads with a ferocity rarely seen in other sports, if you tried that in Rugby (apart from being sent off) you’d likely come of worse as a clash of heads when neither party has a helmet will hurt both parties and it will be immediate not something that shows itself years later as early onset Parkinsons or something equally as hideous.
UFC is great, the skill set required is huge and you can no longer get on simply by being a thug…the fighters need both a world class stand up game and a world class ground game.
