Check this out…

First off MMA is the cumulative culmination of fighting arts pure and simple.
It is not an abberation, it does not require a cage which limits both fighters techniques and the spectators view.

All mma requires is imagination, sadly this is limited in the ufc and its fans of the cage.

Second…
I compared the respective POPULARITY of nfl and arena football. I’ll help you out here…

NFL been around for a while like fighting sports.
Arena football newer like ufc and uses a cage to contain and maintain the flow of action. Football + hockey style containment system = Arena football, it does not equal more popularity was my point.

Finally…
The cage adds a sense of street and illegality to the fights. The cage was designed by John Millius who directed the conan movies which featured conan the barbarian fighting in a cage as a slave. The cage as conceived in the ufc is based on gladiatorial conflict between fighters who have no choice but to fight; the cage is locked until a victor is determined. In that way it is similar in appearance to a dog or cockfight, and the casual viewer will get that impression on a purely(at the least) subconscious level.
The cage is not unique, it has been done in the past mainly for psychological effect.

“nuff said

And yeah that Coleman Takada fight was a total work, Coleman did it for his family, meaning he did it to further his PRO wrestling career in Japan.

Doesn’t Spike get better ratings with their 2nd rate pro wrestling shows?? IFL doubled the rating and they got SH*T all over for those ratings!! I think WEC might be something that just takes some word of mouth to start getting over.

I gotta laugh so hard at that arsehole Dana…I hope it eats him up inside that he’s gotta come crawling back to the Silva fight and hyping it back up as the biggest thing since sliced bread after pissing all over Silva’s shoes following the Mirko KO and calling him washed up. Your amazing champ took but ONE punch when actually tested…I bet he’ll be licking his bootheel for a month to get the taste of that crow out of his mouth.

“Sometimes I think I’d rather be punched in the head, frankly.”

PRIDE: Coleman vs Takada
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRXKTTGAQ-g&mode=related&search=

You bring up the comparisons to boxing and wrestling, but those comparisons are invalid. Boxers basically never get “tied up” in the ropes and restarted, because it is a pure standup sport. And wrestlers also never get tied up, because it is all fake.

And comparing it to the NFL? A sport which has “restarts” built into its very nature, in the form of plays and downs? You’re really stretching there.

That makes no sense, IMO.

The cage is an aberration in the history of fighting arts. Fighting arts throughout history have typically been contested in a ring or open area=boxing k1 wrestling judo jui jitsu sumo karate etc…

Casual fans could care less about a cage, as i’m sure they’ve seen a boxing or wrestling match before which has no cage.
Would a casual fan say something like… “yeah well i heard about this mma thing, but once I found out there was no cage involved I said fuck it”?

NFL restarts when players go out of bounds and is bigger than arena football, which i presume has some type of containment device to prevent this.

Why has arena football not exploded?

People pay to see combat not a cage, less cage =more combat.

The UFC is clearly doing something right in terms of marketing, so I’m not saying they should change anything, but I do think that it shouldn’t be a surprise when people make incorrect assumptions about the sport based on stereotypes since I don’t think they spend that much time countering them.

Wasn’t the UFC making a video for athletic commissions (both current for the referees and judges and potential) on the science of MMA? I think a well done video explaining the science of the combat sport and how the .

As for the SMH article, there’s a few things that pop up for me:

*The paper is a pretty well regarded (in terms of journalism quality) broadsheet in Australia with a solid conservative base (I guess the best American comparison would be the Wall Street Journal), although, like the Journal, it seems like the Op-Ed section leaves much to be desired in terms of the overall quality of argument/reporting. In addition, given that the WSJ (in its actual reporting section, no less) was pretty damn negative in their presentation of MMA and seemingly lacking in researching, it seems (to me) that the conservative-leaning newspapers are, on occasion, willing to give up serious research in order to make pretty much libelous articles about the nature of a sport that brings controversy with it (as it, in turns, sells papers since both the supporters of the paper and the nay-sayers will want to see what was said).

*I found it funny that Rampage’s entrance with the chain and howling was mentioned since there are countless examples of colorful entrances historically in Boxing (such as ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd Mayweather Jr. & Hector ‘Macho’ Camacho coming in with Roman uniforms, Roy Jones Jr., Cory Spinks & ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed rapping to the ring, etc.), so its not really something ’shocking’ from just MMA.

*It’s good to see the the Op-Ed section doesn’t have to make any form of logical argumentation/presentation as seen by comments such as There are no rules in UFC except that fighters cannot use weapons (Rampage’s chain was for show). Even in the original UFC events, there were a few rules (such as no fishhooking, biting & eye gouging), so it seems like they read the “There are no rules!” tagline from one of the early posters and said “OK” and just blindly wrote it. Pretty shoddy ‘research’, I must say.

*For a lawyer (as listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Sheehan_%28entertainment_journalist%29), Mr. Sheehan seems to be rather slovenly with regards to his ‘research’ and his attempts to prevent being accused of potentially libelous remarks. Perhaps he needs a journalism ethics course?

My only point was the cage comes with baggage, like it or not, and that bad press due to that should be expected if you continue to use a cage (and promote it as an integral part of the sport the way the UFC has).