OPINION: 15 elements of MMA that need to be changed for the benefit of the sport – Week 2

There are certain aspects of mixed martial arts that simply make no sense.

And when my lovable colleague Pat McCarry took a look at the 15 ways that rugby could be improved, it struck a chord with me and made me think that, as physical as rugby is, MMA is far more dangerous and needs some improvement in pretty much all areas. There are elements of the sport that are still counter-intuitive when it comes to fighter safety, fan enjoyment and the overall legitimisation of the sport. I would like to make it clear that this is very much an opinion piece and I've decided to drip feed my ideas for rule changes over 15 weeks and, while some of them are a little bit out there, I think that they just make sense to switch up. - In Week 1 we looked at how to deal with fighters missing weight.

Week 2. No gloves

This is where you might think I'm going off the rails a tad but I subscribe to the Joe Rogan theory of removing gloves from the equation. The purpose of standard 4-6 oz MMA gloves is to prevent fighters from breaking their hands when striking, a fantastic purpose I concede. The only other plus side of wearing gloves comes by way of the fact that casual fight fans are used to seeing boxers wear gloves. You'd forgive them for looking at two gloveless men throwing punches and marking it up as barbarism. But, logistically, I think that those gloves bring much more negatives than they do positives. Think about it. When you have your hands wrapped with such padding that you could essentially punch a wall without injuring yourself, you would have no reason not to swing with venom at the jaw of your opponent. [caption id="attachment_33921" align="alignnone" width="240"] X-ray of Mark Hunt's broken hand[/caption] That leads to a lot of healthy hands but a lot of brain trauma coming the other way. I truly believe that gloveless competitors would be far less liberal with their haymakers and focus more on technical boxing than knockout blows. https://youtu.be/uUMevBKzUGc Those bonkers MMA rules allow fighters to connect with unpadded shins, knees and elbows to the unprotected skulls of opponent but yet knuckles are the issue? Seems bizarre. I say leave it up to the fighters to protect their hands by throwing better punches and make the issue of concussions more important. Not only would the elimination of gloves make sense for the above reasons but I think that gloveless competitors would make for more realistic conditions. It would aid the submission game of most fighters who are used to training Jiu-Jitsu without the clunky hand padding so again, technique will prosper. And you'd also think that the rate of eye pokes would go way down if gloves were taken out of the equation. https://youtu.be/Me561PrMRp4 The reason behind most pokes is that the curvature of the gloves promotes a kind of semi-fist where the fingertips are forced outwards, or eyewards if you will. If you've ever worn an MMA glove, you'll be aware that it's actually harder to make a fist than to keep your hand open which seems counter-intuitive for the product's purpose. Get rid of the glove and you'll have fighters being more cautious with their punches which will reduce concussive injuries, you'll enjoy more technical grappling and you'll see far less detached retinas in the cage. Come back next week when we suppose that wonder how the weight cut can be made safer for fighters.