When I was watching the DREAM fights, I couldn’t help but think that elbows would have added a lot to some of the fights. It’s a lot easier for the guy on the bottom to neutralize his opponent’s GNP when you only have to worry about punches. I mean, punches are nice, but they’re most effective from about an arm’s length away, not up close. So you end up with a bunch of weak arm punches that don’t do much damage.

Keep elbows, add knees, and we’re good to go.

In 2007, the UFC held 171 fights. Two of them were stopped due to cuts, Belcher/Starnes and Lytle/Alves. Only Belcher/Starnes can be linked to an elbow stoppage, and even then it’s not clear what was the actual cut was caused by as Alan was throwing an absolute torrent of knees, kicks, elbows, and punches towards Starnes. In any case, it wasn’t an elbow on the ground that caused the cut.

In 2006, the UFC featured 158 matches. Again, two were stopped for cuts. One was cuts sustained due to knees in the clinch (Kongo/Aldana), while the other (Yves Edwards vs. Joe Stevenson), was, in fact, stopped due to cuts caused by elbows (this would more accurately be described as ‘hundreds of elbows thrown with bad intentions’) on the ground.

So therefore, between 2006 and 2007, there was only one fight out of 329 in the UFC that was stopped due to cuts from elbows on the ground. That is 0.003%. Hardly an issue IMO, and unlikely to ‘piss off the fans’ when it rarely happens.

So as long as you have a competent referee that stops a fight at the right time (unlike Yuji Shamada, who lets fighters take too much of a beating), knees to the head would give those wrestlers who can’t finish otherwise a chance to finish fights. And it’s exciting for the fans to see a guy go to side mount or north-south and pummel his opponent’s head with knees.

Kala/Baroni was an awesome fight. The first couple rounds were crazy.

I can see that in North America the soccer kicks and stomps might just come across as too barbaric…but the knees serve a definite purpose and i think would go a long way to making for more exciting fights – and really discourage sloppy shots or inactivity on the ground.

(And, no, I don’t especially like soccer kicks and stomps. I’d prefer them to be completely gone from MMA.)

It was incredibly sloppy, from both fighters. Baroni gassed after three minutes and was falling into takedowns that Hose, incredibly, could not defend.

Baroni took a hell of a beating from round 2 onward, it could have been stopped in any round after that. That the ref stopped it in the fifth seemed almost an arbitrary decision.