Ok, let's see if I can save myself from the white-belt's-first-post stigma with this post.
A few days ago, in a blog out there, somebody clamored, as often happens, for elbows to the head of a downed opponent to be thrown out of the rulebook, because they stop too many fights due to cuts.
A couple of weeks ago, in one of sherdog's radio shows (can't remember which one), one of the hosts also mentioned this belief, and then said that he and his co-host didn't have any data to support or deny this belief.
So...finally tired of hearing arguments based on "I think" and "I believe" I decided to go look for the data.
I went through the results in the fightfinder from UFC 30 to UFC72, with all UFN and TUF finales included, and got the following numbers:
Events: 58
Fights: 457
Stoppages marked as "doctor stoppage" or "cuts": 19
So...4.15% of the fights between UFC30 and UFC72 have been stopped by a doctor or by cuts. Out of these 19, one for sure was a leg injury (Irvin's busted knee), one was an arm injury (Tim Silvia v. Mir) and I'm sure there are other non-elbow-hit related injuries that I just don't remember and didn't have the video to check out.
So...let's concede that there's 17 fights stopped from cuts resulting from elbows to the head of a downed opponent. only 3.71% of fights in the last 58 UFC events have been stopped because of cuts done with elbows (remember, this is a supposition, because there's plenty of "doctor stoppage" without a reason in the fightfinder).
In case anybody is curious, I also pulled out other data for the last 15 UFC PPVs, like knockouts and submissions and so on...you can follow the thread
here My posts are under the same nick as here, Vox.
So...3.71% of fights being stopped this way is enough reason for elbows to be outlawed in MMA? Not in my opinion...what about in yours?