One of my buddies played several years for the Dallas Cowboys and was a safety and linebacker for a powerhouse D1 school.
He is an athletic freak of a person and incredibly strong. He would rank a 10 out of 10 on your “core strength” meter.
One night at his house he wanted to have a go. I was able to choke him out back to back like he was an infant.
Was it because he lacked core strength or insane athletic ability? No. He just didn’t know what the fuck to do. Does that mean he would have sucked at MMA? Not at all, and nobody in their right mind could make that type of assertion.
Yeah grappling is muscle memory primarily I’ve seen plenty of unatheletic nerdy video game types choke out high level athletes in the Gym with much better core and functional strength.
Maybe i wasnt in my right mind, but i was correct. I knew she was gonna quit MMA. She struggled against the worst WMMA fighters they could find. And it was simply because they could bully her physically in the grappling. They looked as lost as she did technically.
Really going out on a limb with that prediction considering she was making millions of dollars more as a boxer lol.
The only way she ever could have made it to the highest levels of MMA was to quit boxing and start training full-time in MMA.
She was just doing it part-time on the side with a few months of experience when she made her debut.
Who exactly should she have been fighting? She was brand new at grappling and fought two brown belts. Who the hell do you think people are fighting in their first MMA fight coming in with zero grappling experience???
Sorry man I strongly disagree with pretty much everything you said and I don’t find any of it based in reality. Just my opinion.
What is there to disagree with? I was right. She got dominated grappling in all 3 fights. She did MMA for 2 full years. She was not “new” to grappling and still got rag dolled. The last girl went up 2 weight classes to fight her and still treated her like a kid in the grappling.
She literally is the female version of CM Punk.
PFL just put her in there with even worse competition.
Well now that you ask, FRAT. First your goofy “core strength” meter assertion is just absurd bro talk not grounded in any kind of reality.
She made her debut with a 5 months of training. She wasn’t training full-time for years, she was training intermittently on the side. She literally had months of training for the first two fights and then probably around a year by the 3rd of actual training.
For someone who’s never grappled in their life, that isn’t jack shit. I’m just going off my experience of somebody who’s grappled for many years, competed, and fought professionally. Maybe you have different experience.
She won two out of her three fights beating two people with significantly more experience who were brown belts.
And LOL that thinking somebody with barely any grappling experience should come in and dominate grappling in an MMA fight against people with much more experience than than her. That tells me all I need to know right there.
Core strength isnt the right term, ill admit that.
There was just something missing athletically. Clearly not in the striking, but she looked clumsy and uncoordinated (even in the striking sometimes). I know I keep bringing up CM Punk, but that’s literally who she reminded me of. No amount of training was gonna get her anywhere past low levels unless she was able to get in a time machine and start as a kid.
I’ve never trained with any person starting with zero grappling experience that still didn’t look like an infant on the ground at 5 months compared to people with more experience. Especially any female.
All I can say is your assertions aren’t based in any kind of reality I’ve ever experienced so we can agree to disagree.
Who in their right mind thought CM punk was going to do anything with his limited amount of training when he made his debut? He was a white belt and looked like it. They all look like shit.
Even still, he had three to four times as much experience as she did with MMA training when he made his debut.
I get where you are coming from, but you are only looking at it from a grappling perspective.
She is a world champion boxer. Her #1 goal was to not get taken down. We’ve seen other elite strikers do MMA for a very short period of time and have great takedown defense. Clarissa just couldnt stop the takedowns. And they werent even the best takedowns. Body locks, basic trips.
Getting schooled on the ground is fine, but offering zero takedown defense as a world champion boxer, that doesnt take years of training as we have seen from other fighters.
She was a world champion in a combat sport, and she couldnt get past the very lowest level of MMA. They couldnt even find her bad enough opponents to make her look good. If you dont think there was a physical element she was missing that is crucial to the mma game, i dont know what to tell you.
We’ve seen elite strikers with 5 months of MMA training fight at the high levels of the UFC? Who?
If that’s been done, you can count on one hand because that’s exceptionally rare. Most guys fight on the Junior League regional circuits building up their experience and training.
Honestly I’ve read enough.
I’ll just bite my tongue and say we can agree to disagree.
Cro cop, holm, carano, izzy and others went straight into mma with little to no grappling. These are just the ones off the top of my head. I think Pereira did to, but he lost. Maybe he is a good example of what clarissa could hace done.
All right. I said I was out on this conversation but I guess not.
Holly Holm had at least a year maybe more of MMA training when she made her debut and she was fighting regional circuit.
Carano was a different era entirely and not applicable.
Adesanya had 2 years of MMA training focused on wrestling and grappling before his MMA debut and it was also against regional opponents.
Claressa had 5 months with her debut. And she ended up going 2-1.
Pereira was choked out in his debut.
Bottom line is nobody, especially you, can determine how she would have done in MMA because she was just getting started. We had not seen enough, only someone at white belt level early in their MMA training and doing it part-time.
She couldn’t grapple worth a damn. It’s probably better she stays away and just boxes. I saw her get her ass handed to her by much smaller women wrestlers. If she fought somebody on Harrison’s level, she’d go home with one of her arms missing.
