Trying to score

There has been a lot of chat about the scoring system in MMA since the Jones v Reyes fight. The issue wasn’t that Jones won the fight. Rather, it was the score of one judge that caused the controversy.

This is how a round is scored; the UFC employs a 10-point must system. That is, each fighter starts the round with 10 points, as the round progresses, the judges determine the winner, who gets 10 points for that round, while the loser receives 9. If, however, there is a knock down and that fighter wins the round, they get 10 while their opponent gets 8 – two knock downs make it a 10 – 7 round. This is how you get scores like 115 – 113 in boxing. That is made up of one fighter wining 7 rounds and the other fighter winning 5 rounds. If we do the math quickly, 7 rounds of 10 is 70 points add the 5 rounds of 9 (45) then the total for that fighter is 115 (70+45). For the other fighter it is the other way as 5 rounds of 10 and 7 rounds of 9 which is 113 (50+63). This is how boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai is all scored.

What makes MMA so interesting though, is the addition of grappling sports to striking. In regard to scoring, when we think about striking, both fighters start with 10 and one loses points as the round goes on. In BJJ and wrestling though, you start with no points and you accumulate them as the match goes on. So, you can see right away that it is going to be tricky scoring an MMA fight with just striking styled scoring. To complicate this even further, for a long time they had boxing and kickboxing judges scoring the MMA fights and this caused a heavy bias towards the striking. If I am honest, I believe that the bias is still there today. However, I think all of us have that bias as we understand striking better than other fight sports. When you see a fighter land a punch and drop the opponent, you know exactly what’s happened and it is very primal to have one fighter standing and the other knocked down – no one needs to tell you who is winning.

To contrast that with watching wrestling or BJJ, most people will have no idea who is winning – it is a much harder sport to watch casually. This means if you are watching a fight and one fighter gets a takedown, controls the opponent for 4 and a half minutes, then in the last 30 seconds of the round the fighter gets back to their feet and lands a big punch and drops the wrestler. How would you score that round? Most people would give it even or lean towards the big punch at the end of the round that edged it. However, when you think about it, one fighter had complete control for 4:30 then they get up and land one punch and now that dictates the winning of the round. If you had the same situation standing and one fighter is dominating the stand up with landing lots of shots but nothing big just a better striker. Then at the end of the round he gets taken down with a massive slam, no one is giving that round to the wrestler.

To me it is not the scoring system that is wrong with MMA, it is more the people scoring. With the Jones v Reyes fight, one judge had it 49 – 46 meaning that Jones won 4 of the 5 rounds. You talk to anyone who watched that fight and they would say Reyes won rounds 1 and 2, the the 3rd being questionable, then 4 and 5 to Jones. This means it all came down to the 3rd round. If the scores were 48 – 47 to either fighter, one fighter winning 3 and the other fighter winning 2, then no one would’ve argued. It was the fact that one judge had it so wrong. Then add to the fact that there were 5 split decisions on that card and that one judge was the split on each of them. That means that out of the three people scoring the fight, two of them had one fighter winning whereas he had the other fighter winning. This happens from time to time in tight fights but not 5 times in one night – that is just plain incompetence. Former fighters can make good judges as they understand fighting as well as anyone. But the bias towards striking is hard to deal with. For those that have not had a wrestler take you down and you spend the next two minutes of your life trying to get back to your feet while you get rag dolled, I can tell you it is one of the most exhausting things you can do and it demoralises you like you wouldn’t believe. Being completely controlled by a BJJ guy that just keeps you down and every move you make seems to put you in a worse spot and it feels like you spend a round running for your life, even though you are lying down. If you take a punch, it is a split-second thing and you can pretend it didn’t hurt, make space and get your head back in the game. Even when someone throws a flurry at you, you may be a bit hurt, but you can hide the effects and move around to recover. When you’re on the ground, there is no pretending, no hiding and it takes your energy like you wouldn’t believe.

The scoring system is fine, they just need some guidelines about what wins a round. Even if statistics, time of control, strikes landed and so on are used to separate a close round. There should be a way to deal with a blatant bad decision, like a review board. Personal opinion is what makes sport interesting, with refs, judges and so on and we do not want a computer scoring the fight. However, we do need to stronger guidelines to answer the age old question which is better, a punch or a takedown?

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor