Defending against multiple opponents? Possible?

This is something I've been thinking about lately, and it was brought on again by watching a Fight Quest episode where the hosts do a self defence focused style. As part of the show the guys occasionally face multiple opponents and usually end up on their back getting pummeled. During sim days with JWT that's also something that's happened to me a few times. Even if people broke away to escape I was sometimes left wondering how it would have gone in real life. With at least a couple I can remember "escaping" the encounter, but knowing I took a couple hits that in real life would have at least rocked me.



This leads me to wonder if RBSD styles, or martial arts generally, genuinely try to teach beating multiple opponents, of its more a case of just being as used to it as you can be and trying your best to not end up in the hospital for too long.



It seems that decent places put far more emphasis on escaping than entertaining the idea of actually beating multiple people but even that seems a bit ambitious. Its certainly possible, but is it actually likely in the grand scheme of things? Isn't it a bit more like how I imagine knife defence where you teach people ideas that can work, and you drill them in the hopes that they will, but at the end of the day you have to accept you probably will get hurt to at least some degree?