Women's MMA Boring Me Recently

First I want to state that this is nothing against women's mixed martial arts. This is simply my view of the situation. When women's mma first burst onto the scene, it almost never failed to deliver. For nine minutes, these women would go out and put on a show. Most the times there were limited to no spells of inactivity, but recently something has changed. There are a couple causes to this I believe. The first one is five minute rounds and the second one is the growth of the sport.

Let’s concentrate on the five minute rounds first. The first women's mma bout that I ever watched was three minute rounds and had nothing but action from the opening bell to the end of the bout. I came away shocked at just how much I had enjoyed watching it. I found that this trend continued over the next couple years as I even got to the point I was looking forward to the women's matches. Yet recently I have found more disconnect and boredom while watching their fights. They seem more methodical, more defensive, and dare I say it, more afraid to lose. Could this be because they have more time to work out the fight and they are not forced to go balls to the wall for three minutes to win the round? Or maybe there are other factors in play.

The other angle that you can look at this from is the growth of the sport. There are female mma organizations out there now, and more organizations are lending themselves to putting women's mma bouts on their cards. This is a great thing for the sport, but it also puts a lot more pressure on the upper tier women. Wins and losses become more and more important as getting on television is a big deal for these women and their sponsorships/magazine spreads/modeling. The reality is that being a women's mma fighter is not about just being a women's mma fighter. There are many other factors in play. I think we often see this in mma in general, fighters become timid and careful to avoid being finished over the course of the fight. This usually leads to more stalling, and more fighters only training to maintain positional advantages, but overall they ultimately take less risks. Maybe this is just the growth stage of women's mma as well, but only time will tell whether it can sustain or whether it will lose support over the years.