Are fighters stealing recovery time?
If you were watching UFC 106 you more than likely watched the Koscheck/Johnson fight and if you were watching that fight you more than likely saw the knee that Johnson gave to Koscheck while Josh was down. What you may have missed however, was the controversy surrounding Koscheck’s reaction after the foul happened. Just to catch everyone up, Kos was kneed to the face while he was trying to get up. At normal speed it appeared that he was hit in is left eye with the knee. Josh’s reaction afterword appeared to confirm this as he was squinting his left eye. The only issue is in slow motion replay, it appears that the knee was no where near the left eye at all. Not only that but there is fair evidence to say that the knee never hit Josh’s head but instead hit his arm. If it is the case that Josh was never hit with the knee, then why would he want to fake the foul? The answer to this question uncovers a subtle strategy that I think fighters use a lot more than we think, and that is stealing recovery time.
Now stealing is of course a harsh word as this undermines the integrity of fighters throughout MMA. However, it is universally accepted that the time for fighters to recover should only be during the time in between rounds and that if the match is paused for any reason, either for doctors to check injuries or lost mouth pieces, that the ref should actively be looking to get the match back up and running as soon as possible to prevent fighters from getting any excessive recovery time. Ergo if fighters actively do certain things in an attempt to pause or delay the match in order to recover, are they not in essence breaking the rules in some sort of way? Now, many of you reading this would say to me that I am reading way too much into this and that even if Kos was faking it that it would be an isolated incident. I would concede that this is true in the sense of someone faking a foul, but NOT in terms of a fighter finding ways to gain more time to recover.
The two best examples I can think of are Forrest Griffin and Jamie Varner. In his match against Stephan Bonnar Forrest had his face busted open and was bleeding quite profusely. The ref paused the match in order to have the doctor take a look at Forrest’s nose to see if he could safely continue. Forrest has openly admitted that he waked towards someone else he knew was not the doctor in an attempt to gain more time to recover from the slugfest match that was happening between him and Stephan. This is an example of where Forrest was legitimately injured, but actively did a little trick to gain time. You also have Jamie Varner, who is his match lost his mouthpiece during an attack from McCullough. Varner then called a “time out” in order to get his mouthpiece back in. Now I’m sure the the loss of the mouthpiece was completely accidental, but the fact that Varner took the time out exactly during the period when he was getting ground and pounded and that he spent a good deal of time fiddling around with it before he got started shows that he was fine with milking it for as long as he could.
I’m not saying that fighters look to actively fake injuries like soccer players do, but there is I think an angle that fighters do try to play in order to gain time for recovery. In all three cases Kos, Forrest, and Varner were the victors in their matches. One could argue that the results may have been different if the fighters were not able to have the match stalled in their favor. Of course though this is all speculation and we’ll never know for sure. One thing is for certain, recovery time is a precious commodity in MMA and I would not be surprised if fighters do whatever they can to buy more of it.
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