So, Money Mayweather is marketed as a terrible person for silly reasons, but is actually a terrible person in a way that those involved with the boxing industry are largely silent about. Gotta love the bullshit theater behind professional sports, eh?
The man is great at two things: boxing and trolling people.
Well, UFC women's bantamweight champion Ronda "Rowdy" Rousey has taken shots at Money Mayweather for his history of domestic abuse. Her most recent dig came after winning the ESPY Fighter of the Year award, when she sarcastically wondered how it felt for a girl to be beating him for a change (Mayweather was also nominated for the award). He responded with an uninspired comment about how much money he makes, and now the internet is abuzz with talks of a hypothetical Money vs Rowdy match up.
There are plenty of people, qualified and unqualified alike, offering their opinions as to who would win in a hypothetical MMA fight between the two. Rather than just give my opinion like everyone else, I'll break down different factors to consider in a hypothetical match between the two.
And no, this won't just be me saying "Mayweather's hope lies in his boxing while Rousey's lies in her grappling" like everyone else. We'll be digging a little deeper than that.
Factors in Rousey's Favor
1. Mayweather's Stance: When developing as a fighter of any sort, one deceptively important decision comes in the details of your stance. Do you make your stance more side on, so that your lead leg and shoulder are far forward and your body is practically perpendicular with your opponent's, or should you be more squared up, so that your entire body is facing towards your opponent's?
No fighter will either square up completely or go completely side on. The trick comes in deciding exactly how squared up or side on your stance should be. In boxing, there is good argument to be made for standing more side on than squared up. It presents less of a target to your opponent, and also allows you to protect your face better when you hide your chin behind your lead shoulder, which will absorb most shots aimed at your head from that side (this is known as a "shoulder roll"). Mayweather is a prime example of a boxer who stands in a very side on stance, and is an absolute super saiyan when it comes to using the shoulder roll.
Notice how he is almost perpendicular to his opponent, and because of that
his lead shoulder protects him from his opponent's right hand quite nicely.
It serves him very well in boxing. In MMA (as well as kickboxing), however, there are a lot more than just punches to take into account.
When you stand in a side on stance like Mayweather does, your lead leg is very far forward. This is good in that it gives you range, but it also leaves your leg very exposed to attack. This doesn't matter in boxing, of course, but in a combat sport where kicks are allowed, it becomes a serious problem. In the UFC, fights have been won by TKOs by leg kick, and even fights that don't end explicitly in TKO by leg kick can still be decided by them because they severely limit movement when done consistently and with effort.
Against someone like Mayweather, who has no experience dealing with kicks, Rousey could go to town on his lead leg. She could also go for single leg takedowns against that leg; it's not her specialty, since she is much more adept at the clinch, but against someone as untrained in grappling as Mayweather she'd still be able to get the single leg pretty consistently.
2. The Clinch: No, this isn't me insulting your fighting knowledge by saying Rousey has an advantage here. What I'm talking about is Mayweather's love of the clinch. Money has made a science of not getting hit in his matches; when he is at range, he uses his fantastic footwork, head movement, and aforementioned shoulder rollering to avoid damage. When he's forced into an up close exchange, however, one of his favorite tactics is to dive into the clinch after throwing a combination. This happens time and time again in his matches, including against Manny Pacquiao, which upset a lot of people who expect boxing matches to be Rock Em Sock Em Robot matches where fighters stand in front of each other and exchange haymakers until someone falls down.
Though a lot of the memes made after the match were, admittedly, pretty hilarious.
Mayweather's tendency to clinch would get him into huge trouble against Rousey. Now, obviously he'll be aware of this and wouldn't consciously choose to clinch against Rousey. The issue, though, is that he has spent over two decades, day in and day out for hours on end, cultivating a boxing style that includes a habit of clinching with fellow boxers as a defense tactic. That's not something that would be easily dropped after a few months, or even a year, of training against an instinct you have developed as long as someone born in the mid-90s has been alive.
3. Variety of Attack: MMA is full of examples of "superior" strikers getting out-struck by people who are grappling specialists. Often, fans will either attribute this to the striker having an "off night" against the grappler or the striker getting "exposed" by losing on the feet, depending on whether or not they were rooting for the striker. What it actually is, however, is a case of MMA science.
When you're such a good grappler that your opponent is afraid of grappling against you, it actually opens up your ability to land strikes. The reason is this: defending against a clinch or takedown attempt is very different from defending against strikes. A strategy that elite MMA fighters with a grappling base love to use is feinting a takedown, which causes an opponent to drop their hands, then throwing a strike that catches their opponent off-guard. Former heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez is an ace at mixing up his grappling and striking offense this way.
Wrestling-based Velasquez would not have landed this many punches
against punching-specialist Dos Santos in a pure boxing match.
Ronda Rousey is no Cain Velasquez (that's not an insult- very few fighters can do what he does), but she nonetheless mixes up her strikes and grappling nicely, especially during her last few fights. To be clear, her boxing needs work: she throws wild strikes and walks straight forward toward her opponents (more on that in the next section). But when she comes toward them, her opponent has no idea if she is going to attempt to clinch or hit her, because she is known to alternate between both. They have to be ready for anything, and spreading an opponent's defense thin like that means you can land good shots against someone who is theoretically the "better" striker.
Factors in Mayweather's Favor
1. Physical Strength: I'm not going to go into this too much because most people know this already, but yes, cisgendered men are generally physically stronger than cisgendered women of the same size. That would affect how the bout was fought, because Rousey would need to be much more careful about messing up against Floyd than the other way around.
Of course, we've seen it before where the smaller person uses superior fighting technique and strategy to beat the bigger person:
...but the fact remains that a disparity between their physical strength exists.
2. Footwork: Mayweather is an expert at controlling range. When he wants to get close, he clinches; when he wants to be far away, he uses his excellent footwork. I already mentioned how his clinching would become a liability against Rousey, but his footwork would be exactly the opposite.
As I alluded to above, Rousey's main tactic for getting into the clinch against her opponents has been walking straight toward them and swinging away. In her most recent match against the hilariously over-matched Bethe Correia she did exactly that. Against someone like Mayweather, who has the ability to use his footwork to circle out against danger or come in on varied lines of attack, Rousey's tactic of walking straight forward to engage her opponent would fail miserably.
3. Body Shots: If Rousey's key to slowing down Mayweather is leg kicks, then Mayweather's best shot at slowing down Rousey is through body shots. Good body shots are devastating (I know from experience; I dreaded them in both boxing and muay thai sparring). They also rob you of energy. Because MMA fighters don't have time to develop their striking ability as much as boxers and kickboxers do, however, they often neglect body shots and mostly hunt for the head when throwing their punches (though there are exceptions, such as the aforementioned Junior Dos Santos and the Diaz brothers).
Dos Santos landing a body shot, which we don't see enough of in MMA.
Keys to Victory
Rousey: Rousey's biggest key to victory would be to attack that lead leg which Mayweather leaves sticking out while in his heavily side on stance. She could attempt leg kicks to slow him down and draw out the match, single leg takedowns to try and get him to the ground and end it quickly, or, ideally, alternate between both. If she did this while improving her ring craft to a level that she isn't just walking straight forward and swinging, she would eventually get the fight to the ground and undoubtedly finish it.
Mayweather: Mayweather would want to use his footwork to control the range of the fight. He'd have to stay mostly on the outside, only coming in on smart lines of attack to throw a few punches then get right back out before Rousey could get her hands on him. He'd want to make sure he alternated between shots to the body and head in order to keep Rousey guessing. Every additional way in which he could make himself elusive would, of course, come in handy.
Verdict
It would be an intense fight, but in the end, history has shown that as long as a grappler has at least a little striking competence, they will beat the striker with little grappling competence, even if there's a strength gap. We saw it when Royce Gracie dominated the early UFC tournaments, even when his opponents out-weighed him dramatically (before weight classes, 176 pound Royce often went up against men who weighed well over 200 pounds). We continued to see it time and time again in Pride and the UFC, before fighters became well rounded enough that striking specialists learned basic grappling techniques and defense.
The greatest MMA heavyweight of all time, Fedor Emelianenko, weighed in the range of
about 220-230 pounds in his prime, and was the smaller guy in almost all of his fights.
A lot of people think the strength disparity would be too much for Rousey to overcome. And in the striking exchanges, they very well would be. If Rousey got it in her head that she could actually beat him while staying in striking range the entire match she'd probably lose very quickly, even if her boxing skill level were at all comparable to Mayweather's (and it definitely isn't).
But MMA has a science and set of tactics behind it that are very different than boxing's, and Rousey's experience with and understanding of them outweighs Mayweather's substantially. Physical strength matters- there's a reason why weight classes exist- but there is an irrefutable mountain of evidence that shows elite skill set can overcome a physical strength disparity if the physically stronger person isn't near their opponent's skill level.
Prediction: Rousey.
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