It's been said that women's MMA is ten years behind the men's game. The references to Rousey as the Royce Gracie of women's MMA certainly seem to support that. The lesson that most learned at UFC 1 was “wow this ground fighting is really something”. The real lesson should have been that it is very,
very difficult to avoid the clinch.
You miss a punch, you're in the clinch. You land a punch, you're in the clinch. You don't punch, they walk straight in and you're in the clinch. Against Gracie it was bad for the confused nobodies he was fighting, against Rousey even a veteran grappler is in bad shape when they get to the clinch with her.
So for a long time in mixed martial arts there was an attitude of “I better knock this guy out before he gets to the clinch”. Wild right hands and intercepting knee attempts abounded, and they very seldom worked. And yet, that's exactly where we are in the women's bantamweight division right now. The vast majority of Rousey's opponents come out and immediately try to hit her as hard as they can with varied degrees of panicked flailing.
Here was the opening ten seconds from Miesha Tate.
I'm not even going to touch the quality of the boxing right now (I'll talk a little bit about that later when we get to Bethe Correia), the most important thing to note is that every time Tate throws the right hand, she squares up—as anyone does—and that
gives Rousey the clinch with no trouble at all and nothing between her and Rousey to at least make it awkward for her.
And every time the fight got back to the feet, Tate would swing wild and end up chest-to-chest with the Olympian, just in time to get dumped on her back.