Women’s MMA is always a hot button topic, and Mike Straka explores it in a nice segment for Fox News below.
Steve Cofield raises a number of questions at Yahoo. If they have such good gas tanks, why do we see them gas regularly? If women’s MMA is so good, why aren’t there any outlets?
First, I can’t comment on the gas tank issue, but you can watch all sorts of female MMA from Japan and Brazil and you won’t see women gassing in 5 minutes. There just aren’t enough fights out there on a regular basis in the U.S. for fans to make that kind of judgment on.
There are a number of obstacles blocking female MMA from getting an outlet. The first is that it’s hard enough to get any TV deal in MMA due to the stigma, let alone a deal for female MMA. Second, no promotions besides the UFC have really lasted a long time with regular TV exposure, and the UFC has refused to put on women’s fights. The UFC holds the keys to the door and so far they’ve shut women out. Finally, network executives that once opposed men’s MMA are still very squeamish about women. Dave Meltzer told a story about how intense the opposition was at Showtime to airing Carano vs. Kedzie, and what a fight Gary Shaw had to put up to get it on the air. Once the Showtime execs saw it, they never questioned it again.
Finally, comparisons between male and female MMA are really unfair. Men training in MMA have their choice of numerous high end camps, dozens of promotions to fight in, and a virtually unlimited supply of training partners. Women’s MMA is newer and less developed.
To give an example, when Randy Couture was training to fight Tim Sylvia, he was able to look around the MMA world for men that posed similar striking problems, and brought them in to train with him. When Gina Carano trains to fight Cyborg, what are her training options? She has less partners and less people to learn from just because the women’s side of the sport is new and developing. Even so, there are teenage girls in gyms tearing it up across the country that will be future superstars in 5-7 years if women are able to get any kind of outlet.
If you compare the quality of female fighters in 2008 to male fighters in 2008, there is a large discrepancy, but the comparison is also unfair. The better comparison is to look at skill level today among women in the U.S. and then compare it to skill levels among male fighters in 1996-1997 in the U.S. Once you have your comparison right, you can see how talented the girls are.