Last Saturday’s UFC Vegas 31 will go down as one of the more exciting UFC shows of the year. It will also go down as one of the most hideous nights of judging in the sport’s history. Three out of the top four billed fights were marred by judge’s decisions that were controversial at best, outright robbery at worst.
First, rising flyweight star Miranda Maverick lost her undefeated UFC record to UFC company pet Maycee Barber by an outrageous split decision, after outworking and outclassing Barber in every way for three full rounds. Then, Raulian Paiva earned a majority decision over exciting young bantamweight Kyler Phillips, in what seemed like the most clear-cut 28-28 draw of the year: only one judge gave Phillips a 10-8 in what was a dominant first round where Paiva got saved by the bell.
Finally, in the main event former bantamweight champion T.J. Dillashaw was handed a split decision win over stud contender Cory Sandhagen, despite being outstruck for the balance of the fight, having his face split open, and failing on 13 of his 15 takedown attempts. Dillashaw battled through a severe cut and a knee injury to give Sandhagen a heck of a fight, and his gutsy performance should be commended. But I don’t understand how you can watch that fight and find three rounds to give to Dillashaw: rounds 2, 4 and 5 were pretty solid for Sandhagen.
Evidently, judges Sal D’Amato and Junichiro Kamijo disagreed. Another week, it’ll be another of the same group of a few faceless officials making an obviously incorrect call with zero accountability, and then being recycled back into things. Example: the presence of Chris Lee on the judge’s desk for several fights on Saturday night.
Lee – who was actually the only judge to correctly score the Maverick-Barber fight in favor of Maverick, but who scored the Paiva fight 29-28 Paiva – has become notorious for a number of shocking scorecards, including a completely inexplicable 48-47 score in favor of Paul Felder over Rafael dos Anjos last year that had even Felder shaking his head, and the dissenting card in favor of Marvin Vettori beating Israel Adesanya in their first fight. Lee can arrive, do his job incredibly poorly, and then just show back up the next week like nothing happened. There is no oversight, no accountability. Fighters’ careers, and bank accounts, are made and broken off these decisions. People are getting tired of this shit.
Part of the issue is the fact that fighters’ purses are based on a show-win system: for instance, you might get $20,000 to show for the fight, and another $20,000 to win. If you lose, you don’t get that $20,000, even if the way you lost was completely unjust. With fighters already criminally underpaid as it is, and with the costs of training camps being what they are, that shit adds up. MMA is already losing athletes to other sports because of poor compensation. The future is looking more tenuous by the day.
One way that we can mitigate this is by implementing judging reform, while acknowledging that getting the state athletic commissions – opaque bureaucracies that they are – to actually replace underperforming judges will likely never happen. If Adalaide Byrd kept her job after that infamous 118-110 scorecard for Canelo Alvarez over Gennady Golovkin, no one will ever lose theirs.
But what we can do is adjust the way the scorecards are formatted. The 10-point must system was introduced to MMA at the outset of MMA’s positioning itself more as a legitimate sport around the turn of the century. At the time, it was trying to mirror boxing, where the 10-point must system – where the winner of the round receives 10 points, the loser 9 or less – has been the standard for decades. It doesn’t work in boxing, and it doesn’t work in MMA.
The idea that a completely dominant first round can be outweighed by a very close second and third round is the failure inherent in the system. Theoretically, that should be outweighed by the concept of 10-10s and 10-8s, but 10-8s aren’t used enough, and 10-10s almost never. There are so many inconsistencies with how judges apply these scoring rules that the controls need to be taken away from them altogether.
Judges should put their calculators away and score fights as a whole – pick a winner or a loser based on who get the better of the entirety of the action, instead of splitting hairs about what happened in specific rounds. In that case, a fighter dominating certain parts of the fight can’t be outweighed by it being close in other parts of the fight. ONE switched to this style of scoring several years ago and, at least anecdotally, it’s been a rousing success – ONE has plenty of issues as an organization, but rampant judging robberies aren’t usually one of them.
Apply that scoring system to Saturday night’s fights and the calculus changes. Is there any way that Dillashaw’s work over the course of 25 minutes is graded higher than Sandhagen, who busted him up at every opportunity? Is there any way that Barber squeaks past Maverick, who was clearly the better fighter for the balance of the bout? I think not.
The 10-point must system, and the issue of poor judging, is apparent in all combat sports that use it – you think MMA has it bad, just watch boxing. And changing that aspect of the sport would only be a drop in the bucket towards fixing the issues that are plaguing MMA. But it doesn’t stand alone: it ties into many problems concerning fighter pay, advancement and booking.
The sport needs to change. We can start by changing the way it’s judged.
The Big Fight 