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MMA is full of rules that act more as guidelines than hard and fast regulations. Things like strikes to the back of the head, 12-6 elbows, eye pokes, cage grabs; all of these happen often enough in the UFC that fans feel like they know and recognize them, but rarely are they so strictly enforced that they end up changing the outcome of a bout.
One rule that has come up several times lately in key situations, however, is the ‘grounded fighter’ rule. More specifically, the ability to throw knees to the head of a downed opponent especially when they have only one hand and both feet touching the canvas. The severity of the strikes in play in these situations often mean that fighters find themselves too injured to continue after eating what may be an illegal knee. But after years of regulatory meddling, what exactly makes a strike legal or not is one of constant debate.
Arnold Allen takes a loss at UFC 297
Even as recently as the UFC’s latest PPV, top featherweight contender Arnold Allen had a chance for victory snatched away during his bout with Movsar Evloev. After two rounds of getting soundly out-wrestled and out-struck by the former M-1 Global champion, Allen turned things around in round 3. Most notably, he landed a series of heavy knees with his opponent in a 3-point stance—knees that appeared to have Evloev badly hurt.
Unfortunately for Allen, despite many referees and jurisdictions in the US adhering to a version of the downed fighter rule whereby a fighter’s hands must be ‘weight bearing’ for them to be considered a grounded opponent, Ontario’s regulations state that any body part touching the canvas other than the soles of a fighter’s feet renders kicks or knees to the head an illegal strike.
The action was paused, Allen was served with a strong warning, and Evloev was given time to re-gather his bearings—with the Russian eventually going on to win a unanimous 29-28 decision.
“Caught a head-and-arm with about three minutes left in the round, I fired off some knees, and in the moment I believe they were legal,” Allen told fans on his YouTube channel (transcript via MMA Junkie). “I asked the rules backstage, and there was nothing to clarify. Mark Goddard is getting a lot of flack for his call, but when he came in and said he was reffing, me, my coach and my manager were very happy, and I still think he’s one of the best refs out there. I believe he made a mistake, and you know, it’s a tough one. … I do feel I was on to a sequence where I was about to set up a finish.
“My opponent was really hurt. The way he sat down, the way he was reacting from the knees. His hand was off even with the rule. Every knee that landed his hand was in the air. I lifted him up, knee, I lifted him up, knee, I lifted him up, knee. Even with that hand down, hand up rule, they were all legal. Then also its palm on the ground, a weight-bearing palm, not fingertips. So at minimum, it was fingertips when I lifted him up, and it wasn’t weight-bearing. It was just poking the floor, poking the floor. I do believe I would have set up a finish from there.”
California looking for large scale rules revision
It’s situations like the one outlined in the Arnold Allen fight that have California State Athletic Commission (CSAC) director Andy Foster looking to make a change to the grounded fighter rule that will have a sweeping impact on the UFC and MMA in general. Over the years, this rule has gone through a number of revisions that have left a massive mess behind them.
Initially most commissions held that anything other than the soles of a fighters feet touching the mat made them a grounded fighter. That regulation was amended by the ABC in 2017 to say that a fighter must have two points of contact other than their feet (i.e. both hands down), but most commissions ignored that directive creating wildly inconsistent application across the US. Later the regulation was tweaked again, to say that just one hand down would make a fighter grounded, but that the hand must be weight bearing. Once again some commissions made the jump, some didn’t.
At this point, it’s entirely on fighters to know exactly what rules are allowed by which commissions wherever they’re fighting. The UFC runs rules meetings for their cards, and athletes have chances to meet with officials—but as is obvious from Allen’s statement above, even those precautions are hardly foolproof.
Hopefully Foster’s latest move can relieve some of the burden from talent when it comes to jurisdictional inconsistency (although international commissions will likely still be a world unto their own).
“We’re going to get rid of the hand,” Foster said in a recent interview on the MMA Hour. “That’s my proposal. We’re going to get rid of it. If you want to be down, you need to put something else down. Knee, back, anything. Anything other than — you can’t be standing up, putting your hand on the ground. It’s caused too much confusion. A rule that we put in for safety has in fact created an unsafe environment, and it’s created an untenable environment for referees to regulate this. They all view it differently.
“Herb [Dean] likes weight bearing, others do different things, different commissions look at it different ways. You can’t have unified rules where the rules aren’t unified. We’ve got to get rid of this. It’s a situation that we, the regulators, have created. It’s our creation, it hasn’t worked, and we need to fix it.”
Reportedly, Foster expects the ABC to approve his proposal. The question then becomes, however, whether or not other athletic commissions will carry this legislation forward on their own. New ABC guidelines are all well and good, but if we’ve seen the landscape fracture with each new set of rules, it’s hard to think that another change will be the solution that fixes it all.
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