Jungle Fight’s novel response to missing weight
Wallid Ismael: “Deducting points is the minimum they can do. This should be the rules. This is real punishment.”
Making an extreme weight cut is problematic, as it damages the body, and can even be fatal. Missing an extreme weight can be worse still, and result in injustice.
UFC fighters who missed weight went 7-1 this year. At UFC Fight Night 130 Darren Till missed weight by 3.5 pounds, going temporarily blind in the process. Then he beat Stephen Thompson and now sits above ‘Wonderboy’ in the rankings.
Various, sometimes contrary efforts are underway to combat the issue. It’s abundantly clear that the problem needs to be attacked from multiple directions. Wallid Ismael’s Jungle Fight in Brazil has pioneered a novel one.
In 2013 Ismael determined that fines were an insufficient response to missing weight, so beginning at Jungle Fight 48, if a fighter missed weight, a point is deducted from the final scorecard of the offending fighter, and he or she were fined 20% of purse. Miss by over 2.2lbs (1kg) and the fighter loses another point. Miss by more than 4.4lbs (2kgs) and the fighter loses three points in total.
It changes everything,” said Ismael to Guilherme Cruz for MMA Fighting. “They are worried about it. Imagine starting a fight with minus one or two points? I prefer to scrap a fight if someone is more than four pounds over because it’s disrespectful, but some fighters accept it. You can’t benefit the fighter that missed weight.
If you start deducting points, you’ll see that fighters will start to worry about it. It’s interesting. I think it’s the end of the world when someone makes weight but his opponent doesn’t. Deducting points is the minimum they can do. This should be the rules. This is real punishment. I see fighters that miss weight and win close decisions after a hard fight, and they would have lost it if they were deducted points. Tell me, would you have fought the same way if you had cut those final pounds?
Cruz analyzed the 46 Jungle Fight events since then, four of which had missing weigh-ins results. The remaining 42 events saw, 1004 fighter weigh-ins, with 43 failing. The results were a reverse of what we saw in the UFC this year:
•8 fights went to decision, with only one fighter earning a win after failing to make weight;
•11 fights went to decision, with failing fighters going 4-7;
•12 fights ended in T/KO, with failing fighters going 6-6;
•In all, failing fighters went 11-20; and.
•9 fights were canceled, and once both fighters failed and fought each other.
Had Jungle Fight’s points deduction been in place this year, the failing fighters would have gone 4-4 instead of 7-1.