No, the oblique kick should not be banned, and the men pushing hardest for it are chasing the wrong villain.
Demetrious Johnson threw his weight behind the ban on Ariel Helwani's show this month, and the comparison he used gives the whole thing away. "It's like the same thing with the NFL, right? You cannot rough the quarterback because they want to make sure the quarterback has a long career," he said. "I see it the same way for mixed martial arts." Pressed on whether oblique kicks should go, he said, "I think so," because "it can ruin somebody's career." He went further, telling Helwani he'd ban heel hooks too.
I get the instinct. Johnson's real objection is that he finds the technique distasteful: "heel hooks and stepping on somebody's knee, for me, it's like dirty. I don't like the technique. I don't teach that technique." His own reasoning for why he breaks arms instead is honest, and a little chilling: "I'll break somebody's arm because you have an opportunity to tap, right?" A knee doesn't get that courtesy. It's an honest personal code, but a terrible basis for a rule.
The NFL comparison falls apart on inspection. The NFL protects the quarterback's head because the head is where the catastrophic, permanent damage happens. MMA's version of that danger is the thing the sport is built on: repeated blows to the skull. Vicente Luque suffered a brain hemorrhage in a knockout loss and was later medically cleared to walk back into the cage. That's the sport policing its most dangerous outcome. A kick that occasionally wrecks a knee isn't in the same universe.
The sport can't even enforce the safety rule it already wrote down. Pointing your fingers at an opponent's eyes is a foul, spelled out in the unified rules. Herb Dean has openly said "we haven't been enforcing" the part about extended fingers. So the regulators have one rule they ignore, a documented record of sending fighters back into the cage after brain bleeds, and their big new project is the most telegenic strike on the card. Andy Foster floated banning oblique kicks to the knee at a commission meeting after UFC 331. Dana White has said he's open to it. Johnson has now handed them a sound bite. All of them are chasing the strike that looks worst on a replay, while the thing that actually ends careers and lives keeps doing it quietly, years later.
Every technique in this sport carries career-ending risk. That's exactly why you don't start picking off individual strikes by vibe. You enforce what's already on the books and you fund real brain-health protections. Josh Barnett was right to push back on lumping these moves together as if they're one evil.
If you want MMA to protect careers the way the NFL protects quarterbacks, protect the brain. The knee can wait in line behind the thing that's actually killing fighters.
