The Wrestler’s Dilemma and the Athletic Component

After UFC 118, a number of people started talking about something that I’ve been talking about with a few other writers for some time: the role of wrestling in MMA. One of those writers published an interesting piece on the role that wrestling plays in undermining British fighters, as they can’t defend the takedown. I don’t have any solutions for the “British MMA scene” about how it ought to deal with that issue, only particular fighters; and that solution is usually to get out of the British MMA scene for a while, because there is no wrestling. So I’m not particularly helpful on that issue.

The issue that I did want to bring up is a line that appeared in the piece that corresponds to something I’ve been seeing a lot of on the message boards lately: “When you break down the numbers three of the five UFC champions; GSP, Lesnar and Edgar, all have some link to wrestling. This is a perfect illustration of how much success is being enjoyed by exponents of the discipline.”

I’ve actually commented on this issue before, but it’s worth restating my position at length to illustrate why trending in mixed martial arts is not relevant.

Since the institutions of UFC titles, we can track trending in divisions based largely on the title fights occurring in those divisions at any given time, and most divisions are dominated, consistently, by fighters with shared elements of background.

You can see my forum post to see what I’m talking about. The heavyweight division, with a short period of exception where there were no wrestlers competing, has been dominated by wrestlers; as has the welterweight division. The lightheavyweight division has actually become less saturated in wrestlers than it used to be, becoming more striker-centric. The middleweight division has never had an NCAA wrestler for a champion. And the lightweight division is incredibly hard to call because for a while it had only had three radically different champions who (until Frankie Edgar beat B.J. Penn) had never lost a belt in the cage.

There really isn’t enough data to talk about trending, but it does seem fair to point out that, while the UFC has three wrestlers for champions at this moment, there have been periods where they’ve had three BJJ blackbelts. All that means is that, at this moment, there’s a majority. And let’s not forget that the other two champions (Shogun and Anderson) are BJJ blackbelts, which means a single loss to a BJJ blackbelt would shift the balance the other way.

My point is this: I’ve learned that trends in UFC titles are more dependent on individual divisions than the sport, generally, and that if we’re going to comment on wrestling increasing as a trend, it should be acknowledged that the trend exists primarily in three divisions: heavyweight, welterweight and lightweight. Attempts to find a large number of emergent wrestlers in the middleweight division are doomed to fall short after Chael Sonnen, and while some can make the argument that Ryan Bader and others are a symbol of a growing level of wrestling talent at lightheavyweight, the historical lightheavyweight division has been far more wrestler heavy than the current division.

The best argument for the success of wrestlers actually has less to do with wrestling as a style and more to do with its institutionalization as a sport in the United States. The strong argument is that wrestling is physically exhausting and puts a heavy emphasis on building athleticism, so the wrestlers we see (like Jon Jones, or Bader, or Fitch, or Lesnar, or Koscheck; guys who have grown up wrestling) are simply better athletes than guys who don’t grow up in that culture. The other is that they’re more used to cutting weight, so their recovery after the cut is better than those who aren’t, and they’re able to cut more weight. I’m not convinced totally by either of these arguments, because it doesn’t see that wrestlers are as dominant as the argument seems to necessitate, implicitly, but these are definitely advantages of adoption wrestling, and it is apparent looking at the difference in core size between someone like Georges St. Pierre and Dan Hardy. But this is the strong argument, and not the notion that wrestlers are some how more dominant now than they used to be, which is questionable.