Will Ronda Rousey's downfall kill female UFC? Don't panic just yet

Ronda Rousey was rare enough, and the memory of women’s MMA was shallow enough, that some people believed as she went so would the trajectory of female cage fighting. From the moment Rousey proved she could be a driver of mass attention and revenue for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, questions arose about what would happen when she wasn’t around anymore.

Would the UFC, which opened its divisions to women in 2013 because of Rousey, continue to invest in building weight classes without a superstar on which to pin its interest? Could fighters emerge from Rousey’s long shadow to curry similar media attention and sell pay-per-views? Over the long run would fight fans pay the same attention to women fighters the way they do for men?

Following Friday’s stunning result in Las Vegas, when the once untouchable Rousey lost her second consecutive bout, this time in 48 seconds, the concept of the UFC operating without her, or with a shell of her former self, became more real than ever.

Does this mean a downturn for women in MMA is on its way? The landscape has changed in monumental ways since Rousey’s emergence, making concerns about what might happen once she disappeared less dire. In fact, to the surprise of even UFC executives, a slew of women resonated with audiences as the female side of the sport became an entrenched part of the business.

Two weeks before Rousey lost to UFC bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes, Paige VanZant and Michelle Waterson drew 4.8 million viewers to Fox. UFC’s next pay-per-view on 11 February at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, appears likely to feature a main event pitting Holly Holm and Germaine De Randamie in a championship contest that will open up business for the UFC’s female featherweight division. That will make three active weight classes for women in the UFC, including the 115lbs flyweights led by Poland’s Joanna Jedrzejczyk. Prior to that, 28 January on Fox, bantamweights Valentina Shevchenko and Julianna Peña have been slated to headline over several well-known male counterparts.

“The young ones coming through now will define the future for us,” says Shannon Knapp, founder of the all-female promotion Invicta Fighting Championships.

Knapp worked with the Strikeforce promotion that helped build Rousey on Showtime before the UFC absorbed its upstart rival and folded women into the fray. Women in MMA had long fought alongside the men, and for fans who knew what they were watching, the female fights were often the most exciting to watch, but there was always a hesitation to sign them to promoters’ rosters in large numbers. Behind the scenes, matchmaking discussions about women on cards rarely centered on how great an athlete they were, Knapp says: “It was about hot girls.”

One of the major legacies of Rousey’s run will be the doors it opened, not just in the UFC but across the globe. As macho as MMA seems to be, it has welcomed women competitors – and done so without any snide asides.

Knapp made it a point to separate the sexes in her Invicta FC operation, which features close to 70 fighters on its roster, but one of the most impressive aspects about how female MMA is that it generally lives on the same terms as men. Women fight on the same card as men for the same amount of pay under identical rule sets and, as Rousey proved, can receive tremendous media coverage under the right circumstances.

Dr Mary Jo Kane, a director of the Tucker Center at the University of Minnesota which studies the role of media and women in sport, says female MMA fighters benefit from something “incredibly rare”, compared to their counterparts in other sports.

Kane argues that women’s sports continue to expand in spite of what is “essentially a media blackout,” earning only 2-4% of sports media coverage despite huge participation numbers.

“On some level the coverage of MMA and the respect and amount of attention that’s given to women athletes kind of proves my point,” Kane says, “which is that if the media were to provide a platform in which female athletes are given respect as athletes — combatants in this particular case — and then build up superstars.”

This is the world Kayla Harrison sees as she makes her foray into MMA with the NBC-aired World Series of Fighting promotion. The move comes after Harrison won her second straight Olympic gold in judo, making her the only American to accomplish such a feat.

“I look at one of the reasons MMA has become so successful and so popular is my team-mate Ronda,” says Harrison, who competed one weight class above Rousey during the Beijing Olympics. “I look at her and she just sort of has this, ‘I deserved to be treated equally’ attitude. That’s something that I think she got from judo. From the very beginning we’ve been treated as equals.

“I think about the reach MMA fighters have and the impact. It’s a crazy fast growing sport in the United States and the world, especially for women. I’m all about women’s empowerment, and I’m all about doing it the right way and being a true role model for young girls and boys. It’s such an opportunity I’d be a fool not to give it a shot.”

Whether Harrison is the women to replace Rousey is another question. “I think she’s incredibly talented. We’ll see. Some people transition well into our sport. Some people don’t,” says Knapp. “Is she the next Ronda Rousey? I don’t know. I think Ronda is in a class of her own at the moment. I’m not saying Kayla won’t. It’s going to be hard to walk in those footsteps.”

Prior to the introduction of women to the UFC, women had their chances to fight in big spots, including network television when CBS aired MMA. Gina Carano and Cris “Cyborg” became known to mass audiences — an aspect of women’s MMA that seemed to click faster than the men — once they headlined on Showtime. The ratings didn’t slip, and in some cases they grew. MMA watchers have always been drawn to female fights, it just took a competitor like Rousey to elevate the money potential and the number of competitors who wanted to give it a try.

“What you now have for the first time ever in our history is that young girls today grow up with a sense of entitlement to sport that they never had,” says Kane, crediting Title IX which “fundamentally altered the landscape of what it meant for females to be engaged in sports and physical activity.”

Because of the rigors of MMA and the exciting action it creates, old cliches about why it is that women’s sports lag behind the men — a lack of athleticism and power, or that men just aren’t interested in watching women compete — have fallen by the wayside.

“I see that grit, that moxie, that toughness,” Knapp said of women’s MMA fighters. “Sometimes you’re just looking at them and they’re so little and you’re like, ‘oh my gosh.’ The young ones coming through now will define the future for us.”

Harrison also believes female MMA is more of a draw than other women’s sports. “I think in combat sports it happens a little bit less just because it is literally you versus another person and at the end of the day it’s a fight,” she says. “Who wants it more? People, men or women, can push sex aside and see that is a basic thing. It’s caveman stuff. For me I always was the only girl on the mat growing up, but I was treated like one of the guys. It was never treated any differently. The bigger combat sports gets and the bigger viewership it gets the more likely we are to have equal rights and have viewership be equal.”

If Rousey is done as an active competitor, she’ll have left the UFC and MMA in a place where women are respected as peers alongside the men, treated as equals in what can be an unforgiving space.