Podcast – Andrew and Sean are joined by Petesy Carroll to talk the tragic death of Joao Carvalho
Graeme McDonnell 
¦ RSS
Sean and Andrew are joined by Petesy Carroll to talk the tragic death of Joao Carvalho and Irish MMA regulation
*Check out our sponsors*
ROS Sports Nutrition for all your nutrition needs –
Use coupon code: SevereMMA for 25% off your first ROS Nutrition order
Be sure to follow us @SevereMMA , @SevereMMAPod @AndrewMcGahon_ and @SeanSheehanBA on Twitter
To download the MP3, click the small download symbol in the top right corner of the above player.
With regards the UFC, you’re right in saying that it’s no coincidence that they haven’t had any deaths or serious injuries, but this is more to do with probabiity than anything else. There’s been a total of 353 UFC events, out of how many international MMA events overall? Tens of thousands at least? So even if safety precautions and medical oversight is the same for all promotions, odds are that a death or serious injury is going to be at a non ufc event. No doubt UFC have great medical oversight in place at their events, but they’re are still guilty of putting fighters at unnecessary risk for the sake of money. A couple of things that we’ve all come to see as normal, but promotions need to look at are –
1. Arranging extreme mismatches / tune up fights –
Ideally, there should never be a fight where one competitor is a massive underdog. Everyone has a shot in an MMA contest, but by arranging a tune up fight, you’re basically saying that one person is going in there to get beat up. Should a UFC novice really be fighting someone who is proven to be at championship level? e.g. Nurmagomedov / Horcher this weekend, or Dillashaw / Soto in the past? Odds are Horcher will come out of this fight without any serious injury, and compared to other fights, its not that much of a mismatch, but if something does happen, is it really a stretch to question whether he should be fighting someone of Khabibs level?
2. Adding ill prepared fighters to a card on short notice –
e.g. Chad Mendes at UFC 189. The UFC knew well that Mendes wasn’t in shape to fight 5 rounds, but both they, and the NSAC let him fight anyway, no problem. And what happened? He gassed after two rounds and got his head knocked off! And judging by his quick KO loss to Edgar, it looks like he may not have recovered from the McGregor KO, and maybe he wont ever fully get over it. It’s debatable how much body shots contributed to him gassing, but either way he wasn’t fully prepared to fight 5 rounds, so how can we really say it was safe to allow him fight?
Again, theses are two scenarios that everyone sees as normal, but if people are really serious about making the sport as safe
as possible then these type of things need to be considered also.