After Ronda Rousey was left battered and bleeding against the Octagon in only 48 seconds against women’s bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes, one question resounded across the MMA community: what went wrong? How did Ronda Rousey’s big comeback, hyped for months with hashtags like #FearTheReturn, result in her getting completely dismantled in the cage? At least in the Holly Holm fight there was enough action and information to easily dissect what Holly had done right, and what Ronda had done wrong. But Amanda Nunes turned the tables on Rousey, charging forward and smashing through her defenses so quickly that most of us could only wonder in stunned silence how the greatest female mixed martial artist of all time could lose like that.
Now that it’s been two weeks from the fight, we’ve got more than just opinions from the armchair quarterbacks and sports network talking heads of the world. A number of top MMA fighters and coaches have chimed in as well on what they saw and what needs to be done to reverse Ronda’s fortunes in the cage. Let’s start with Holly Holm, the woman who derailed the Rousey hype train at the end of 2015.
“I was a little worried about her mental game getting in there,” Holm said during a recent interview with MMA Fighting. “I know a lot of people said no MMA media, none of that, because she didn’t want any distractions. Well, if you can’t even talk about fighting, if you can’t even be doing the normal thing leading up, I don’t think you’re really ready to get in there and actually fight. If you can’t really talk about it, how are you gonna get in and perform on it?”
“I figured that it would depend on what the first exchanges would be and how Ronda would react to it,” Holm continued. “Would she get hit and kind of freez and go ‘Oh no, not again?’ or if she would think ‘Oh no, not today!’ And I think that’s a make or break moment, so as soon as those first punches [from Nunes] landed and I saw that, then I thought okay, it’s gonna go this way.”
“It was almost like she had gotten worse since her fight with Holly Holm,” welterweight contender Stephen ‘Wonderboy’ Thompson said. “From all that time she spent training after that fight with Holly, you should definitely see some changes going on in your striking you know. Unless, Ronda is not training like she should. If I was her coach and I had saw that in the gym. If I saw there was no improvement then I would not have thrown her out there. I would have said ‘no way are you fighting’. And honestly that is her coaches fault. He should have known where she was at mentally.”
“If I was her coach I would not have let her jump in and fight for the title,” Thompson concluded. “I would have got her to fight somebody lower ranked than that and see what happens with that and go from there. I don’t think Edmond is doing what he is supposed to be doing as her head coach.”
Thompson isn’t the only one criticizing her head coach Edmond Tarverdyan. Most famously, Amanda Nunes actually thanked Tarverdyan after her win for convincing Ronda that she was a boxer.
“He put this thing in her head, and make the girl believe in that,” Nunes said at the UFC 207 post event press conference. “I don’t know why he did that. She had great judo. She could’ve gone more forward in this division, but he put that crazy thing about boxing in there, and her career started going down. I knew she was going to strike with me because her boxing coach, he told her she had good striking. When I went in there, I’m the real striker here. I wanted to look at him and say that.”
Firas Zahabi is the head coach at the TriStar gym in Montreal and one of the most respected coaches in mixed martial arts.
“Is it Edmond’s fault? I don’t think it is,” Zahabi said in a video breakdown he made of the fight. “But I think there are coaches out there that can do a much better job than what Edmond did. That I will agree with. I don’t want to be negative towards anybody, but the job that he did out there against Amanda Nunes was as bad as it can be. That’s the legitimate criticism that I cannot defend. Is his stand up style good for Ronda? Is his approach to training stand up good for Ronda? I would say it’s not.”
“Ronda needs a better approach. The approach he’s using is not working for her, and it will never work for her. This high congested style of position. This still upper body style of positioning, her footwork, all these things will just get her in trouble and knocked out again. People know her weakness, and she has got to change her formula. She should’ve done this after the Holly Holm fight.”
“You fight the way that you spar,” former UFC champ and coach Matt Serra said. “That’s a given. There was no Plan B. There was no, ‘I’ve got to circle, I’ve got to get on the bike a little bit because I’m stunned.’ She was still trying to get a hold of her. These are all things that need to be worked out in sparring. She needs correct sparring, smart sparring. The majority of her sparring should be geared toward mixed martial arts sparring … use the strikes to set in the level changes to get that clinch. I don’t see any of this after the Holly Holm fight. You’d think this is something they would implement. I think [Tarverdyan] means well, but I feel he’s just getting her ready for a stand-up fight type of thing. That’s what it sounds like to me. I still think Ronda is awesome, but I feel that there’s a better way to play to her strengths.”
“In training, she’s doing good,” MMA legend Bas Rutten exclaimed on the Mauro Ranallo podcast. “I heard she’s striking against professional boxers and is doing really well against them. But to bring that striking from the gym to the under pressure fight, that’s a whole different thing. In the training, I guarantee you she’s not that angry as when she walks to the cage. That whole angry look thing needs to go, man. It increases your heartrate, it locks up your body movements so you can’t flow like a butterfly. All that gets gone. So that’s the big difference for her fighting in training, when she’s totally relaxed and doing great. So bring that same feeling, bring it over to the fighting.”
That may not be easy for Ronda to do so long as she stays at Glendale Fight Club with Edmond Tarverdyan. In an expose on Rousey leading up to her fight with Nunes at UFC 207, Bleacher Report’s Jonathan Snowden talked to Ronda’s former strength and conditioning coach Leo Frincu, who described a toxic training environment that led him to quit halfway through Rousey’s stint on The Ultimate Fighter in 2013.
“The way [Edmond] talked to her — wow, what I witnessed!” Frincu said. “The way he talked to everybody, going on these rants. Cursing about how terrible she is. I didn’t feel physically safe. I’m a guy who can take care of himself, but I felt uncomfortable. The next morning I took a plane and I left. It’s all emotional. There’s no logic in that camp. And that makes it very unstable. It’s like walking on eggshells. It’s terrible. It’s so stressful to be in that camp. It’s supposed to be hard work. But it has to be rational. There has to be a plan. Everything there is rage and anger.”
But it’s unlikely that Ronda will leave Tarverdyan even after the near unanimous panning his coaching has received following her second loss. According to Olympic boxer Mikaela Mayer, who worked with Rousey during her UFC 207 camp, the two are simply too close.
“You can tell their connection is so strong, they have a really tight bond,” Mayer said. “When people talk about her finding another coach, I just don’t see that. You have to take responsibility for yourself, every time you have a loss you can’t just blame your coach. You have to say ‘what did I do wrong?’ The coach is a big part of it, but you can’t blame them every time you don’t win a fight.”
It doesn’t have to be some huge betrayal for Ronda to seek out other training. Many of the best MMA fighters in the world split their time between numerous camps. Georges St. Pierre would spend his time travelling between the TriStar gym in Montreal, Renzo Gracie’s in New York, and Greg Jackson’s in New Mexico.
“Her head coach should not only have allowed that but encouraged that,” said Stephen Thompson, another adherent to the multi-gym mindset. “You know my coaches now and in the past, Ray Longo, Firas Zahabi, Greg Jackson, they allow us to go to other gyms so that we can get different looks and different coaching. Because if you stay in one spot forever, yes you will start to understand all of the talent that you surround yourself with, but you won’t get any better than you are because you are only seeing them everyday and only competing against them everyday. You will figure their games out and what they like to do and it will become stale. So you need to go to other gyms that you feel comfortable at, with guys who will take care of you, and spar with different opponents who will give you new and different looks. Clearly that is what Ronda needs to do.”
Whether Ronda ends up fighting again at all remains a mystery at this point. But she’s got no shortage of expert advice to parse should she decide to return to the cage. Unfortunately, it’s a lot of the same stuff that was being said after her loss to Holly Holm over a year ago, words she refused to listen to then. Instead, she lumped all of the negative commentary about the loss together, refusing to separate the mean crap spewed by random internet haters from the legitimate criticisms raised by those in the sport.
Ronda is hardly the first mixed martial artist to be led astray from her strengths by a coach whose style lies in a different area. We can only hope she heeds some of the words from fellow fighters and coaches. Because as the old saying goes, insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over expecting a different outcome.
