The Tyranny of Freedom

In last Saturday's WEC Featherweight Championship fight, Jose Aldo dismantled Urijah Faber almost entirely with leg kicks, methodically administered over the course of five rounds.  These kicks are some of the least exciting moves in Mixed Martial Arts; its just one guy kicking another in the the leg, which is the same move my little brother would use against me when we were kids.  But in the last few months, two UFC-sponsored title fights have been totally dictated by this move.

Shogun Rua picked Lyoto Machida apart using the leg kick, and although he lost a controversial decision, nearly all fight fans thought he dominated the fight, as Machida could barely stand by the end of Round 5.

MMA is a young sport, still in its early-adolescence, so it would be foolish to assume that its reached a strategic equilibrium, where the fighters all have a good understanding of which techniques should predominate.  As strategies evolve, exploitation of the front leg kick might emerge as the new dominant tactic, especially in title fights, where they can wear opponents down over five rounds (as opposed to the typical three rounds used in non-title fights).   Because the kick is so unspectacular, it could make the sport much less entertaining, turning explosive multidisciplinary fights into one-dimensional contests of attrition.

If you were in middle-school, and two kids "fought", but all that happened was one guy kicking the other in the leg, you'd say it "wasn't a real right".  This is probably why fans were booing at the end of Aldo-Faber, even though, tactically speaking, Aldo's performance was masterful.

In the evolution of most sports, a recurring pattern plays out:  a new strategy comes to dominate, its exploitation makes the sport less entertaining, then a new rule is created to weaken the strategy, making the sport fun to watch once again.

In the early 1950s, basketball teams who were ahead would hold the ball, refusing to shoot until they ran out the clock.  In one game, the Pistons beat the Lakers 19-18.  The shot clock was invented 1954 to force teams to actually play.

In hockey, during the early 2000s, teams began to abuse the neutral zone trap, which lowered scoring and fan interest in the sport.  The NHL instituted several rule changes in 2005, and scoring increased from 5.02 goals per game in '03-'04 to 5.53 in '09-'10.

The thing about MMA is that it prides itself on its lack of rules, and sells itself as the purest form of competition; a new rule to address the leg kick would undermine this whole concept.  Without any means to regulate strategy, a sport that's supposed to be an exciting anarchic brawl where "anything-goes" could end up in a tedious equilibrium ruled by a single tactic.

This is much like a state of anarchy, viewed by some as the purest form of society, but where the ultimate equilibrium is inevitably one in which power is aggregated in the hands of a single overlord.  This autocratic asshole, be it a gangster or a monopolistic corporation, ends up controlling everything in the same manner as a government-sanctioned dictator.