Maybe Joe Rogan was being generous with his estimate.
Ronda Rousey said on ESPN’s SportsCenter on Thursday that she could defeat “100 percent” of UFC men’s bantamweights given the right circumstances. Rogan, the UFC’s color commentator, said earlier this week that he thought she might beat half of them.
“I never say that I’m incapable of beating anybody, because I don’t believe in putting limits on myself,” Rousey said. “So I mean, I would have to say if you’re just talking about what’s in the realm of possibility of what’s possible of who I could beat, well I could beat 100 percent of them. You can’t tell me that there’s a zero percent chance that I can beat anyone on the planet, so I’m never gonna say that.”
Remember: The UFC women’s bantamweight champion has also said she could theoretically beat heavyweight champ Cain Velasquez, so this is not new territory for her.
Rousey (11-0) is coming off a 14-second finish of Cat Zingano via armbar at UFC 184 on Saturday in Los Angeles. Almost immediately, the talk oddly turned to how she would fare in a fight against a man. Rousey said she doesn’t mind the comparison and joked to ESPN that she would “throw that idea out there” in a meeting with the UFC on Thursday.
“I’m not offended,” Rousey said Thursday on The Dan Patrick Show. “I really don’t think that’s serious. I consider it a compliment that people will even consider it.”
Why is it that Rousey, 28, seems to be so much better against her competition in the women’s 135-pound division? She said it isn’t the opposition’s fault necessarily — she has just been groomed for this as a judoka since she was a kid. Rousey won the Olympic bronze medal in judo in 2008.
“It’s not that they’re lacking anything so much,” Rousey said on SportsCenter. “They decided later in life that they wanted to be a fighter. A lot of these girls already developed a personality and had a life and one day they decided, ‘I’m gonna give it a try.’ Whereas, this is literally what I was raised to do.”
However, beating Zingano in just 14 seconds seemed to surprise even Rousey. “Rowdy” called it a nearly flawless performance.
“I looked through it and there literally isn’t a single wasted movement the entire fight,” Rousey said. “I wish I could have reacted a little sooner maybe with her charging at me. I can’t say a single bad thing about it, except for my reaction time in the beginning. If you watch it frame by frame, literally I did a backwards cartwheel off my face. I didn’t plan that at all. But if that’s your reaction at the moment, I guess you planned something right.”
Rousey told Dan Patrick that she has heard her next fight could be at the end of summer, around August. But those details will likely be hammered out in a meeting with the UFC on Thursday afternoon. Rousey will be filming a movie called “Mile 22” in May, so her training camp will have to come after that.
And winning in 14 seconds? Rousey considers that a good thing when it comes to longevity.
“I want to win with maximum efficiency and minimum effort,” she told Dan Patrick. “People forget that the shorter the fights are, the more fights that I can have. I feel like I’m actually making my career longer this way.”