There’s always been an apparent disconnect between different areas of focus. Someone takes a particular martial art, then one night the instructor has the class work on “self-defense”,and the material has very little commonality with what is normally taught. In many instances, MMA or other combat sports athletes aren’t really all that different.

Here’s a clip with GSP talking with Lex Fridman about self-defense in which George is presenting a perspective more similar to what you’d find in a typical karate dojo on self-defense night, rather than an MMA gym...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3MoiMCWhGuw

It’s common in many BJJ schools as well. Even with the early Gracie VHS tapes, the self-defense was considered completely separate, with relatively limited overlap between it and the other tapes in the series. I asked Royce about it specifically, but can’t remember his answer after this many years. I do recall asking about the lack of takedown defense, which his reply was “why would the shark mind being dragged into the water”. I found that to be a very odd response in the context of self-defense. The Gracie’s still make the distinction, but the divide is much smaller.

I think there are significant differences between self-defense and other areas of focus, but it can be difficult to make a clear distinction about what that actually means as well as sorting out what’s relevant and what’s likely not. MMA has no doubt taught us many lessons for self-defense, and I jumped on that bandwagon very early on, but people seem to frequently conflate street duels with self-defense. There’s a Venn diagram I see quite often showing partial compared with compete overlap of these different areas, which I think is more accurate.