Battle of Styles: Wrestling Dominates Other Martial Arts

How did you determine which discipline a fighter belonged to?

Seems to me that wrestling has the closest to analogous training, and wrestling allows you to chose whether the fight takes place standing or on the ground. Unless someone is better than a wrestler in both standing and on the ground (and can deal with the disruption created by takedowns) it makes sense that wrestling would have the best record.

Lesnar = Wrestling (base)
Rua = Muay Thai (base) – slick BJJ game
Anderson Silva = Muay Thai (base)
Georges St. Pierre = Karate base – arguably the most well-rounded champion, killer grappler, EXCELLENT wrestling
Frankie Edgar = Wrestling (base) – watch out for his striking

I put Silva, GSP and Lesnar in bold because they have several title defenses.

Fighters who can do more than just one thing. Condit is one of my favs. His combos were amazing on Saturday. Cains striking looked exceptionally crisp as well against Nog.

Interesting post. I am wondering why there are no distinctions between kickboxing and muay thai boxing.

Of the current sorry state of MMA judging than anything else.

Though, there is one word I would use to combat this thought process— brazilians.

Josh Barnett’s wrestling is not everyone else’s wrestling. Catch is a significantly different style than the greco roman and freestyle that populates the rest of the list. I don’t know that he’d fit better in another category (maybe mixed, since catch is a mixed style), but I wouldn’t count him as a wrestler, exactly.

Also, you said you were doing the top 10 in each of the 7 weight classes, but there’s only 68 guys listed. I figured there might be overlap (like Shields and Anderson), but….where’s Wagnney Fabiano?

Who in the US was getting into BJJ or kickboxing 10 years ago? Not to bash anyone here who did, but it wasn’t likely to be the guys with the athleticism to go out and play football/basketball/money-hype sports at the highest level too. There was much more crossover for top athletes with wrestling, although that’s still not typically where the top guys go.

I’m pretty sure if the money/fame/exposure was right and 18 year old 5-star athlete football players were getting into MMA en masse, we’d be talking about football being the best “base”.

for MMA under the current Unified Rules and judging. MMA is world’s apart from what it was in the true vale tudo style days, and even further away from real world fighting.

In MMA, an elite MMA > an elite BJJ (or other submission) player.

In the real world, where from the obvious like eye gouges, head butts and various groin techniques are used, to small joint manipulations, fish hooking, throws using the head and/or neck as gripe points, claw chokes, throat/kidney/spine/back of head strikes and many others are used, everything else being equal, the elite JJ/BJJ/Sambo/Catch Wrestling guys beats the elite pure MMA wrestler.

If anything went (and the money were right) true MMA would be ruled by ex-special forces guys from various countries who would leave a trail of maimed fighters (and outrage officials) behind.

Love him or hate him, everyone’s got a comment.

When every champion with the possible exception of MW (where there aren’t really any elite mma wrestlers, although Sonnen is an elite wrestler in general) will have won with a wrestling based style?

This is def. skewed a little in favor of wrestling. Shields may have a wrestling base, but you have to classify him as a BJJ fighter… he has his own “type” of jui jitsu for crying out loud.

Barnett is more of a Catch wrestler, which is more grappling then wrestling (IMO).

Rampage hasn’t used wrestling to win a fight since he beat Arona. And that wasn’t even wrestling, that was just pure power.

Dos Santos is only a purple or brown belt in BJJ, so while, again, it might be the first discipline he trained it, it clearly isn’t the one he’s most proficient at.

simple.

Throughout the history of MMA, guys like CroCop, Wandy, Liddell and more recently JDS, Aldo and Silva have shown that guys who are primary strikers can succeed at the highest levels of the sport, and can compete effectively against wrestlers.

I think part of the reason for the dominance of wrestling in MMA is that MMA is the only professional outlet for wrestlers, while strikers have a wide range of established professional options to choose from. We don’t need to look any farther than Ubereem, who can’t seem to decide whether he wants to be a pro kickboxer or an MMA champ.

As MMA continues to supplant boxing and kickboxing as the premier global combat sport, I would predict you’d see a larger number of striking-based fighters succeeding in the sport.

The only problem is that it’s not the style that determines who wins the fight. It’s the fighter. “Styles make fights”; true, but they don’t win fights. Put two highly decorated wrestlers against each other and the majority of the time you will see them stand and fight because both of their primary strengths have been equally matched. In this day and age of MMA, it is almost impossible to compete with top level fighters (wrestling based or not) if you have no wrestling ability. With that said, what if a wrestler can’t get his or her opponent to the ground? Thats where the concept of MMA arises and you get to witness what other skills that fighter truely posseses.
 
My point is that fighters who have a strong wrestling base but are lacking in striking, bjj, ect. will only go so far until they are matched with an opponent whos wrestling ability is up to par, but whos other discipline’s are much more superior than theirs.

In ten years from now, when we look at who the champions are, we won’t be saying "So and so, the amazing wrestler, or the amazing striker or jiu jitsu wizard. We will say “So and so, the amazing Mixed Martial Artist.”

Evolution is inevitable.

Let’s ask the most simple question there is: can you make a compelling argument based on data that another base is more dominant than wrestling today? If so, show your work and methodology and we will see which is more compelling: that nearly 50% of the current Top Ten fighters in the sport come from a wrestling base or whatever it is that you bring to the table. I am not saying that Snowden is absolutely right, but so far all I see is people complaining about his sample size being too large or too small or that they don’t agree with his definition of ‘base’- and all that is fine, but then construct your own argument disproving his thesis.

But you cant teach years of cardio, weight cutting, and ground control.

Wrestling is the best platform to build upon because it can neutralize most other disciplines.

I cannot count wrestling as a martial art in and of itself. Catch wrestling sure, but basic greco roman or freestyle are not martial arts as they have been specifically designed for competition and used in that medium for so long that the “martial” has been all but completely removed from the “art”. You cannot finish a fight with wrestling as you can with any other “martial” discipline. This is not to say wrestling is not an essential part of a Mixed Martial Artist’s repertoire. I personally don’t know what category wrestling, in MMA, falls under, but it does not fall under the “martial” category. That being said, you can have a wrestling base, but you need to, IM humble O, add martial disciplines to that base. Let the anti-antiwrestling haterade commence…

There are submissions in Judo. Throws and such. Where in amateur wrestling is it alright to drop someone on their head?

Why? Snowden did what he set out to do: look at the top level of the sport. Does it really matter if he expands it to the top 15? Top 10 is elite enough for me. No one claimed this was science, it’s just an interesting picture for us to look like, and hardly news to me. I think he did the best he could categorizing it too.

There’s probably a better way to classify people with proficiency in multiple disciplines. And the line is getting more and more blurred these days. I’d say the criteria should be what the person has relied on to win (or avoid losing) more than anything. For example: Overeem. We can argue about his submission background but the guy is obviously a striker. He’s one of the only guys that can hang in K-1. Does he have submissions? Sure. But a lot of the time he gets them after dropping someone. Did he judo toss Brett Rogers? Somewhat, but he also clocked him first.

Snowden, you had to know this was going to get nitpicked to shit as soon as people saw it. Good on you for doing it anyway.

25 of the 28 fighters in the wrestling category were born/raised in the United States where amateur wrestling is prevalent. 31 of the 42 fighters in the other categories grew up outside of North America where wrestling is not as prevalent. Most of the guys in the sample are/were Zuffa/Strikeforce fighters. It stands to reason given the amount of amateur wrestlers in America, that a sport dominated by American companies would be dominated by people with a base in the country’s most popular discipline.

What fighter claims ‘Wrestling’ as his only style? Typically any well rounded fighter boasts a grappling and striking style, such as Muay Thai/BJJ or Wrestling/Boxing… WTF is ‘mixed’? Do you mean ‘freestyle’? If so, that can refer to either striking or grappling, which would mean this entire list is just a pile of garbage and total waste of time…