By Boxing Insider Staff

Ronda Rousey returns to the cage Saturday night against Gina Carano at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, the main event of MVP MMA 1 on Netflix. Days out from the bout, video of Rousey’s open-workout striking session has become the dominant story of fight week, and not in the way Most Valuable Promotions would have drawn it up.

Clips of Rousey throwing punches in front of cameras circulated widely on social media this week, drawing mockery from fans and fighters. One widely shared post on X declared that Rousey “looks like she’s never trained striking in her life,” a sentiment echoed across MMA and boxing accounts.

Rousey, 39, told reporters during fight week that she began preparing for the comeback in 2024 while pregnant. “I was about three months pregnant when my husband caught me doing suplexes in the garage,” she said, referencing former UFC heavyweight Travis Browne. At Thursday’s press conference, Rousey was asked whether she would hesitate to break Carano’s arm in the cage. “I definitely wouldn’t have any hesitation in breaking it,” she said. “But I also wouldn’t hesitate in putting it back in place.”

The Trailblazer Context

The reception to the workout footage carries an extra weight given Rousey’s place in combat sports history. She was the first female fighter signed by the UFC, headlined UFC 157 against Liz Carmouche in February 2013 in the promotion’s first women’s bout, and held the bantamweight title through six defenses. Her mainstream visibility, magazine covers, ESPY awards, Hollywood roles, is widely credited with making women’s MMA a marketable headlining product.

That visibility extended beyond MMA. The infrastructure and audience Rousey helped build for women’s combat sports in the mid-2010s preceded the commercial growth women’s professional boxing has seen in the years since, the era that produced Katie Taylor, Claressa Shields, Amanda Serrano, and the first women’s main events at Madison Square Garden and on stadium-level boxing cards.

The Mayweather Cycle

The viral striking clips also revive memory of one of the stranger promotional cycles in recent combat sports media history. Through 2014 and 2015, with Rousey at the peak of her UFC run, the question of whether she could beat Floyd Mayweather circulated in interviews, on talk shows, and across sports columns for the better part of two years.

The framing was usually pushed by others rather than by Rousey herself. UFC president Dana White said publicly that Rousey would hurt Mayweather in a fight. Conor McGregor told The Guardian in 2015 that Rousey “would dismantle him in seconds.” Rousey, asked directly during a Reddit AMA in August 2015 whether she could beat Mayweather, gave a more measured answer. “Floyd is one of the best boxers of all time,” she said. “He would definitely beat me in a boxing match. I unfortunately don’t get into ‘matches.’ I fight for a living.” She added that in a no-rules fight, she believed she could beat anyone, as ESPN reported at the time.

The boxing-specific version of the question, whether Rousey could compete with the pound-for-pound boxer of her generation, was largely a media and promotional construct. Mayweather himself shut it down at the 2015 ESPYs, telling reporters he had yet to see an MMA fighter earn what he had earned in a single fight.

Saturday Night

Rousey enters the Carano fight at 12-2 in professional MMA, having last competed in December 2016, when she was stopped by Amanda Nunes in 48 seconds. Carano, 7-1, has not fought since 2009. The bout is scheduled for five rounds at a 145-pound featherweight limit. Nate Diaz and Mike Perry serve as the co-main event, with Francis Ngannou and Philipe Lins also on the main card, per ESPN’s card breakdown.

The fight is being billed as a final professional appearance for both women. Whatever happens in the cage, the response to a few seconds of mitt work this week is its own data point on how much the conversation around female combat sports, a conversation Rousey was central in launching, has changed in the decade since her name was floated opposite Mayweather’s.