On a card that’s loaded with engaging matchups this weekend, one of the more intriguing ones comes from Strikeforce’s women’s division in Marloes Coenen vs Miesha Tate. Coenen, with world class striking ability and proven jiu-jitsu from the bottom, takes on an opponent with a diametrically opposed skill-set in Tate, who had at high school wrestled against men. Both are well-spoken and terrific representatives of the sport, and in a perfect world they’d be featured prominently in a UFC women’s division that found itself promoted with as much visibility as their male counterparts.
Both have the sort of feminine grace and looks that standouts in other women’s sports like Hope Solo have; they’re athletic but haven’t lost their femininity. In a way if you were creating a perfect fighter to present to the world, you could do quite well by taking their ability to be professional athletes while also being first rate individuals when it comes to speaking with the media, et al. But this isn’t the beginning of a renaissance of women’s MMA. It’s one of the last great peaks in it. Why?
Because there are not enough talented women for WMMA to have any sort of viable future in the near term in any real capacity.
Strikeforce’s women’s division has four name fighters and then a series of seemingly interchangeable parts when it comes to the sum of its women’s division. Once you get past Coenen, Tate, Gina Carano and Cristiane Santos you don’t have any real depth of fighters in Strikeforce. Expanding the scope outside of the Zuffa umbrella and eliminating any restriction on weight classes leaves a depth of top quality women’s fighters that isn’t much deeper than 20 fighters at the most.
In order for a women’s division to be viable, at a minimum you would need this amount to have a consistently deep division per weight class. Say what you want about the lack of depth in some men’s divisions, especially heavyweight, but there are at least 25 fighters with high levels of skill per division. There may not be five world class fighters but there’s enough depth of talent that a champion in each division will have plenty of quality opponents to fight a year.
You can’t say that about women’s MMA, and that’s a problem.
In comparison the average season of “The Ultimate Fighter” has almost twice that number of fighters looking just to win a spot in the house. Almost that many fighters actually make it in, as well, and usually almost that many fighters spend time on the show per season with replacements, etc, factored in. If you launched an all female version of that show you’d have to stretch the limits of credibility to get that many fighters worthy of being in the house and fighting for a contract.
The cream of the crop in WMMA more than holds its own when compared against their male counterparts. Women’s MMA can be just as entertaining as their male counterparts to watch. It’s hard to argue against watching a fighter like Santos, a female version of early Wanderlei Silva, because she’s fun to watch and is an excellent fighter. But after running roughshod over the women’s division as it stands now it’s hard to justify continually feeding her opponents who have a much smaller chance of winning than Carano, Coenen, et al, did.
That’s the problem and it’s why Tate-Coenen, which has a strong chance of being the best fight on a fairly stacked card, can’t be viewed as anything more than a momentary peak on the way down for women in MMA outside of being what Joe Rogan has called a “professional hot chick” like Britney Palmer, et al. And it’s a shame, really, because a fighter with the sort of ability to broach the mainstream sports press like Tate or Coenen ought to have the ability to do so instead of being relegated elsewhere.
