Recently Sean Strickland kind of ruffled some feathers when he was asked about sharing a card with women MMA fighters at UFC 297. Sean has been known to have a bit of a mouth on him and he didn't hold anything back when he was asked about how he feels about women's MMA.
Basically he said that he doesn't care of it and that it wouldn't exist if it wasn't coupled with the men's division.
Sure, have women’s MMA, have it be a thing. I don’t like to watch it. I don’t think most people like to watch it. If the female MMA was to separate from the male MMA no-one’s going to watch that shit.
Now while I will admit that some of the more boring fights on undercards do have a tendency to be women's fights and Thug Rose really didn't do the women any favors by having the most boring title defense of all time a few years back. I also think that some of the greatest MMA fights of all time have been with women in the octagon.
Anyone out there remember the fight between Zhang Weili and JJ? Well that was the one where both of them took a tremendous amount of damage and JJ's head looked like the elephant man towards the end but she absolutely refused to give up. She didn't look like a person at the end of that one but even after taking so much damage she was swinging for the fences with every strike.
Then there was most of the Amanda Nunes fights: With the exception of her boring retirement match where she didn't seem to be really trying to win but rather to just not lose, almost all of her fights were absolutely outstanding.
Now let's go back to a point in time where women's MMA was actually MORE popular and more profitable than the men's was.
Anyone remember this lady? Well there was a time when Ronda Rousey was the highest paid UFC fighter on the roster. She pulled more people to watch the sport than almost anyone else and she was getting huge paydays. She was also finishing almost all of her opponents in the first round. Every one of her fights were exciting as hell but the only problem was that she finished her enemies so quickly. Sometimes I felt like she finished them far too quickly. There was never a "dancing contest" where she was just trying to preserve her championship reign and then won on the scorecards. I think that there might have been some inside job talk about her mixing up her game a bit to make it more entertaining for the crowds because her judo style mixed with submission finishes perhaps wasn't what Dana White and the top people at UFC wanted to hear.
She changed her style and that lead to a very rapid downfall for her unfortunately. This still doesn't diminish her immense reign at the top and how huge of a draw she was for the sport. She basically solidified the women's division as something that people wanted to watch.
I don't know why Sean Strickland decided to say what he did but for me at least, I am normally very excited about women being on the cards at PPV events or even Fight Night events. I believe that for the most part the women in the top tiers probably try a lot harder than the men do simply because they have to in order to get noticed.
I think there is a really good chance that Sean is trying to make a name for himself as a bit of a heel in order to get a bit more notoriety in the sport. Most people now believe that he is a fluke champion and that he will not hold onto that belt for very long. His upcoming bout with Dricus Du Plessis is in my mind a bit of an easy one that UFC catered for him in the hopes that he will win and add a bit of credibility to his championship. If he doesn't win that one, I believe that he will fade into obscurity rather rapidly. I know that I didn't pay a great deal of attention to his career until he shockingly won the belt from Israel Adesanya.
Therefore I don't really think he means what he is saying right now but he is instead using his time in the spotlight, which may be brief, in order to establish himself some sort of persona like Chael Sonnen and Colby Covington did. It could be a wise tactic though because both of those guys ended up with many fights they didn't necessarily deserve because they were controversial.
If he does mean what he said about women's MMA though, I completely disagree with him as do most of my friends. This isn't a WNBA vs NBA type situation: The women's fights are often better than the men's in my opinion.