Josh Barnett has some problems with the current state of MMA, and a few ways to fix it.
An ever-present conversation in the world of MMA is how can the sport improve? With the UFC setting the standard, other MMA promotions attempt to answer this question with their own tweaks. For instance, ONE Championship allows knees to the head of grounded opponents and tries not to encourage weight cutting, while PFL has a season format for most bouts and doesn’t allow elbows. But Barnett — the former UFC heavyweight champion and veteran of Pancrase, Pride, and Strikeforce — thinks they’re all doing it wrong.
“The rule structure of MMA has to change because we’ve already gamed it,” Barnett said recently on The MMA Hour. “The system is gamed. Five minutes has been figure out, how to work that five minutes: Stay mostly as a kickboxer, only score your takedowns when you need to. If you do score that takedown, you know they’re just getting right back up again, so it’s really not even about establishing any control on the ground.
“When you look at submission work anymore, it’s essentially sleeper holds, rear-naked chokes … But the thing is, one, five minutes is not enough time to get anything up and established, and the reason why the sleeper is the finish you see the most, is it all comes off someone getting hit. Someone gets dazed, they start stumbling, you get on them, you take their back and you choke them. Or you get on top, you wear them out, you start punching them, they turn, you choke them. It’s not takedown, set them up, take their back and just choke them, clean. That’s really rare these days.”
Of course, Barnett hails from a grappling background. The former IBJJF no-gi world champion was famed for his catch-wrestling style in MMA, earning 19 of his 35 career win via submission. And for him, the recent trend toward kickboxing it moving the sport away from its roots. He points to recent UFC champions Israel Adesanya and Alex Pereira as the harbingers of this movement.
“You watch a lot of events now and it’s just, oh, this is basically a kickboxing match, this is a kickboxing match, this is a kickboxing match,” Barnett said. “They’re great fighters, Adesanya and Pereira. They’re great fighters. But watching their first and then their second fight, people are being like, ‘This is the greatest MMA fight!’ They’re not MMA fighters. They kickbox. They kickboxed the whole time. I saw no MMA work.
“I saw nothing but the same thing they would do in Glory, but with smaller gloves. Why not just fight in Glory? Obviously because there’s not enough money, notoriety, whatever. And they’ve managed to make their style work well for them. That goes to show you what capable, competent athletes they are, what good coaching they have. They’re game dudes.”
Barnett made it clear he’s not picking on Adesanya and Pereira, but merely that they are symptoms of an overall shift in the MMA metagame. In a perfect world, Barnett would like to see a shift back toward a time when the martial arts were more mixed, and he has a few rule proposals he believes would create more well-rounded fights.
“They’re great fighters and they’d be tough for anyone to deal with, but I think if the rounds were longer, people were starting to put more emphasis on takedown work and control, and being really heavy-handed about standups — not standing up people quite as much, and being really vicious about fence grabs to get back to your feet or to stop takedowns, I think they wouldn’t have as much success,” Barnett said. “[Pereira and Adesanya] would still be top of the heap because they’re just that tough, but I think you would see a different shake out in the fighter structure than there is today. I think you need more time to do that. I think at least 10 minutes [for a round], and I think putting knees to the head of a grounded opponent at the least, which would help people like Adesanya and Pereira, but it would help grapplers too. It helps everybody.
“And Pride-style total fight scoring. It makes way more sense. Guys going out there like, ‘I need to win a round and a round, and I’ve won the fight. As long as I don’t get knocked out or anything like that, I won the fight. 10-9, 10-9, I’m out of here.’”
Essentially Barnett argues for a return to the rule set of Pride, where he competed for a large part of his career. But there is one thing Pride didn’t do that Barnett would like to see implemented: Remove weight-cutting altogether.
“The weight-cutting thing, that needs to be completely eliminated,” Barnett said. “It needs to be same day weigh-ins. It’s been gamed. If I want to watch people at 170 pounds fight each other at 190, then why don’t I just make it 190? It’s just pointless. And you would see that CTE would go down without weight cutting, injuries would reduce. You’re pulling all the water out and we already know you can’t get it back in your system. There’s less water in your brain — that’s a scientific fact, they’ve done studies — so you’re going to get more concussions and you’re going to get more bruising and potential calcification of the brain from it hitting even harder, because there’s no cushion up there.
“Now imagine that water is not in your joints and ligaments like it was. You’re going to see more injuries in terms of people dislocating limbs, tearing ligaments, because all the things that are there for the health of the structure have been depleted so you can make a weight class and go in there and fight at a weight you didn’t weigh in at.”
As interesting as Barnett’s ideas might be, the likelihood of any of them happening at the highest levels of MMA anytime soon is fairly slim.
Still, it’s nice to know “The Warmaster” is thinking about ways to make things better.
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