Striking vs. Submissions

One of the comments in the telecast the other night about how wrestling gives you the advantage of being able to choose where a fight ends up started me thinking about the evolving role of the different disciplines in MMA and how they interact. I’ve only been following MMA for about 18 months after following boxing for years. The last two UFCs had subconsciously conditioned me to think that striking was taking over hugely from submissions as a way of finishing a fight early. I guessed that this was down to a number of things such as:

1.      submissions being harder to master.

2.      rules being structured by organisations to be more favourable to strikers and therefore more entertaining to the general public.

3.      wrestlers using their wrestling as a delivery system for strikes which when combined with the high incidence of wrestlers makes strikes more prevalent than submissions.

Then I watched the Munoz-Hamill fight. I had read a few previews that reasoned Munoz far better wrestling pedigree would mean he should handily beat someone like Hamill who came from a wrestling background. When I saw a kick ending it, it only re-enforced the conclusion that strikes are the most effective weapon. I decided to go back and look at results from the last 10 UFCs to see how the breakdown compared between submissions and strikes. A statistician would quite rightly argue that by not counting fights which went to a decision I am not really giving a fair reflection of the respective roles although I would guess that striking played a bigger role in most of these fights.  They would also argue that 10 UFCs are not a statistical sample which is fair enough.

    (Originally had an excel graph but embarrassed to say could not get it to appear in this post).

To my surprise my perception that finishes from striking hugely out-numbered those from submissions was not totally true despite any potential bias against submission specialists e.g. stand-ups etc.

So, I had a few questions of the other people here:

Do you think this limited data proves anything in relation to strikers vs. submission specialists?

Do you think the deck has been artificially stacked against submission specialists or is it just that opponents have become better at neutralising jiu-jitsu?

And one last question, if a decent boxer (not someone like Rahman who has been dialling in their performances for a while) , say David Haye trained for a reasonable amount of time in takedown defence and grappling and competed at 205, could he consistently emulate the Hamill contest and end most fights with strikes? (Hopefully this questions does not get me slaughtered, I am not some delusional who thinks a top boxer could be successful in MMA without serious cross-training).