Originally Posted by
Sharpandpointies
Good luck working this out, is what I can say. :P Size is just one of a lot of factors that tend to work with each other. Is it one of the IMPORTANT factors? Sure. But is there a synergy? Also, sure.
What follows is anecdotal. So not proof but just to ramble around to my point.
A ways back, I was in a school where we did heavy/often full-contact stuff (I'm too 'not young' and busted up for that crap now). We weren't trying to kill each other, but we were beating each other up pretty badly -- and stupidly -- with no more protection than MMA gloves and mouthguards. People got KO'ed, bones were broken (not often, thank god), etc. That's not me bragging, that's me shaking my head at the dumbness of it all, though to be honest it did teach quite a bit. Anyway. We didn't have weight classes, there were only about a dozen of us actively participating in this madness.
I was one of the smaller guys in the club. Most of them were about 5'11" - 6'1", weighing between 190 and 230. The shorter guy, who was an inch under me, still outweighed me by about 25 lbs, most of it muscle, and had a lot more time under his metaphorical belt doing this kind of stuff. I was and still am about 5'9" and 150 - 155 lbs (though my body fat is ridiculously low, so it's almost all bone and muscle). AND only experienced people were allowed to spar, so people knew how to hit and protect themselves.
Needless to say, I was getting beat up a lot (my wife was...not pleased).
However, I was the only person with any training in grappling (seven years of judo), and I discovered something: if I could get my hands on these big lunks -- who had a lot of good, solid striking ability -- I could relatively easily take them down and then wreck them on the ground. I kid you not. I've hit the ground with people who outweighed me by 60, 70 lbs and ended things in about five seconds. Sometimes it would take longer, but I'd shut down their attempts to strike (it's hard on the ground), worm my way into position, then choke 'em out or apply leverage to whatever limb they had given to me by trying to awkwardly hit me.
These guys were fighters. Not 'Mike Tyson', but they had the same level of contact experience as me, and years and years of training in club where we did unrehearsed resistance training, that kind of thing, rather than forms-forms-forms. They found this really interesting, and suddenly lots wanted to learn to grapple. I found it really interesting and surprising as well; the first time I hit the ground (I'd like to say 'mats', but it was linoleum flooring) with a huge guy, I damn near killed him because I was working with the idea he was going to wreck my shit...and he was nowhere close to that. I slammed him down (osoto gari, if anyone knows their Japanese throws) from a 'clinch' and slapped a choke on waaaay too fast while his brain was still trying to catch up to what happened.
Was a huge shock. For both of us.
One of these dudes, however -- the biggest guy -- I'd take him on and end up losing after about 2 minutes because I'd gas out. He had zero actual grappling training, but he'd been in LOTS of fights in his life (on 'Teh Streetz') and knew how to use his ~230 lbs weight. It was impossible for me to take him.
However, another one -- a 240 lbs, 6' monster, chunky but still really strong -- I choked out three times in a row, starting facing him just out of arm's reach, both of us on our knees. And using the exact same choke, slapped on from the moment he reached for me. This isn't a brag either -- dude had scratch-zero experience with this kind of thing, so it's not like I was doing anything awesome.
By contrast, there was a 130 lbs young lady there who would lose to everyone...but give them all HUGE amounts of trouble because she had all of three years of judo experience. They'd eventually get her, but they'd have a hell of a time because she had skill and they didn't (and we were into the level of 'can just reach up and peel her arms off my neck if she's trying to choke them'). Ironically, she made me work harder than a lot of the bigger guys because she knew what she was doing (and I didn't have 100 lbs on her).
And once one of the other guys -- 6', 190 lbs -- started training with me regularly and taking his grappling seriously, it rapidly got harder and hard to make him tap. We'd fight like maniacs every week, starting standing with striking but grappling fully allowed, and it felt like every time I needed to pull out something new to sub the guy if we hit the ground. I recall him beating me once before the club kind of fell apart (he also wrecked my knee in a standing situation, but that was at least partly my fault...).
Heck, even the other guys who didn't train as hardcore with me (I started running a grappling class because I saw there was a hole in our training) made things more difficult because they had some experience after losing to me a bunch of times. They LEARNED. And learned to use their weight better. I'd still beat them, but it would take longer, and I could see that eventually they'd learn to leverage their size in ways that would make things REALLY difficult, like the dude who was sooooo much bigger than me and just had a lot of experience in rough-and-tumble stuff.
Basically, what I'm getting at is that we can likely find EXAMPLES of 'size mattering waaaaay too much', but coming up with some exact idea of 'how much is that much?' is going to be nigh-impossible, due to all of the other factors that link in with it. Some completely unskilled tekla? Sure, a little, skilled guy is going to run rings around him and hurt him badly. Someone who is athletic but unskilled? Narrows the potential size gap somewhat. Someone who is athletic and skilled in a single venue of fighting? Narrows the potential size gap further. Etc.
Also, one must consider the venue as well. Reach matters far more in, say, striking than it does in grappling.
tl;dr: There's just too much, in my opinion, to nail down 'when too much is too much'. One can only say 'at some point, it will be', and that point will depend on the people in question.
Mileage, it doth vary.