sylverdrag

…and Dom had won that round on all score cards, so it doesn’t change anything. However Dom won 3 rounds of that fight, so he should have had his hand raised regardless.

These things have to be evaluated case by case. You can have a round where fighter A throws a hundred strikes and fighter B throws just the one. Who wins? Well, it depends. If A’s hundred strikes don’t seem to affect B and B’s one strike puts A on his ass and he gets rescued by the bell, B won that round. It’s effective striking/grappling.

Same for takedowns. You have to look at what that takedowns means for the fight. When Demian Maia scores a takedown, the fight is almost as good as over. It’s huge. When Yoel scores a takedown, it’s "meh". Rarely has any impact on the fight.

There is a subjective element to it that can’t really be abstracted away. If you try to put very clear "one takedown is that many points, one uppercut is that many points, etc." within a couple years, MMA goes the way of Karate point fighting:.

Jones has made a career of beating smaller opponents. There are few guys on his resume who are about the same size as he is and they have given him a lot of trouble:

Gus (first fight, before getting starched by Johnson)
OSP (Jones should have wrecked OSP skill-wise, but it turned into a strangely competitive fight)
Bader (Jones didn’t have trouble, but Bader was quite green back then)
Reyes (Jones objectively lost 3 rounds out of 5)

Everyone else on his record has been quite undersized.

Going up to HW and fighting guys the same size as he is spells trouble for Jones. Jones has proven he can take punches from Reyes, but he was getting hit quite a bit and I wonder how his chin would hold with a guy like Ngannou.

All of the great names that Jones fought were one or two weight classes smaller than Jones.

Khabib is fighting guys who really are in his weight class.

When faced with guys who are about the same size as him, Jones doesn’t look that invincible, and that’s what we have seen today. Couldn’t bully Reyes, had to respect his punching power, and couldn’t get any real offense going. Same thing happened with OSP. When fighting guys who really are in the same weight class, Jones looks good, but he certainly doesn’t look like a killer.

Look at the opponents Jones has faced: Machida, Vitor, Evans, Sonnen, Smith, Santos.

They are solid names, but you know what else they have in common? They are all about 20lb smaller than him. They all belong at 185 or 195. And then, there are a bunch of guys like Teixeira and Shogun who belong at 195lb. These guys are all very good, but they are significantly undersized for the division.

Because of the way the UFC weight classes work, Jones has literally been fighting down a weight class his whole career. Very few of Jones’ opponents have been legit 205ers, and as a result he is fighting with a huge reach and strength advantage.

All of Khabib’s opponents are legit LWs. They are not BW hanging around in the wrong weight class.

Jon Jones has fought bigger names, but he has NOT fought better competition.

Santos proved to be a much bigger challenge than he was supposed to be. Not sure if you remember, but Jones needed help to walk after that fight. So yeah, Joe said the same thing, and it was true.

Reyes moves well, hits hard and his striking is technically sound. He wrestled in High School and his takedown defense isn’t bad. He is also the same size as Jones. He could indeed be the most dangerous opponent since DC.

There are degrees of injury. A partial tear of the ACL isn’t the same as a complete tear of the same. He must has estimated that the knee was still stable enough to permit the contest to continue.

With that said, I think he fucked up big time and his decision not to stop the fight in spite of an injury probably cost that young lady several months of recovery time/training, because obviously a partial tear can be made worse and a cage fight isn’t exactly the best recovery protocol.

Of course a fight is called off if the doctor estimates that the fighter is no longer able to compete safely, and a torn ACL definitely falls under that category.

As for Paige, well, Paige is a very tough lady and she has proven it a lot of times, there’s no "even Paige…". Regardless, Paige’s fight would have been stopped if the doctor knew she had a broken arm, but if I recall correctly, the doctor never even stepped in the cage in that fight.