MMA judges or legislatures
By Yehia El Behery on Nov 29, 2009
Observing action in the fight then scoring it based on a set of predefined rules, that should be the MMA judge’s job.
Instead, judges in our beloved sport observe the action, make up the rules and then score that action based on those made up rules each fight.
What else should they do? they don’t have any rules to score fights upon. All they have is some guidelines that everyone interprets his own way.
Unless a fight is one sided (but not too one sided), the three judges (and fans, journalists…etc) scorecards often turn out differently (sometimes even from their own initial scorecards after re-watching the fight).
That’s because everybody makes up the rules (i.e. interprets the aforementioned guidelines) each single fight while watching it.
So, how about we agree on the rules before fights? lock up all those “judges” in a room and not let them out until they agree on those rules.
That way (even if those rules turn out to be absolute crap), fighters will do stuff that scores, know for sure where they are on the judges scorecards throughout the fight, fans will get the decisions they expected (the fair ones most of the time), judges will actually agree with each other and journalists will stop whining about it.
to be continued…
Originally posted on my blog MMAStaredown.com
Filed Under: MMA
I think a lot of people believe that this is an easy thing to fix. It is very difficult to do.
I would recommend creating a national MMA athletic commission. They would then update the rules and be in charge of training all refs and judges.
Your article is good. I’ve wondered “why the he11 don’t they have a system for judges along the lines of BJM’s COMMAND system for ref’s?” They should take a number of fights on video, fights that have specific techniques displayed. Have any potential judge sit in a room and score the fight. There should be a BJM sort of guy to help them score the fights. If watching the same video the judges score the fight very different ways then it’s clear there is a problem (not that it isn’t clear already). This isn’t rocket science, all judges should sit through a series of fights on video and learn how to score techniques.
They also should understand the fighters that they are judging and should be forced to review their previous fights to understand what they are doing. This shortcoming was clearly evidenced by Cecil Peoples in the Shogun/Machida fight. I’m not even going into whether that was a bad decision or not, my point is People’s reasoning for why he scored Machida more favourably was clearly misguided.
I don’t have the links to the articles but Peoples did 2 interviews where he said the following:
1. Machida was moving backwards and therefore forcing Shogun to come forward. This was good ring generalship by Machida.
2. Shogun was unable to take Machida down in the clinch and therefore he doesn’t get any points for not doing what he was trying to do. Machida on the other hand does score points for defending the takedown because that is considered successful grappling.
Regarding point (1). If Peoples understood both fighter’s styles he would know that Machida’s style always consists of moving backwards and Shogun’s style always consists of moving forward. He somehow was unaware of this and then viewed Machida’s backward style as “good cage generalship”.
Regarding point (2). I’m not saying Shogun should get a lot of value for being unsuccessful in what he was trying to do but to me at least he was on the offensive and did have Machida in a defensive position and in a position where he did not want to be. Giving Machida a points edge for these cageside clinches seems to illustrate a real lack of knowledge about what is worth what.
In addition to a Judges version of COMMAND, judges should also be required to know the styles of all the fighters they will be judging and therefore understand things like Shogun moving forward isn’t a result of chasing Machida, it’s simply his style. Similarly if a guy like Big Nog or Palhares or other skilled BJJ guy pulls guard it’s not being taken down, it’s taking the other fighter into “his own area of expertise” and points should be given to a fighter like Nog or Palhares in this example.
Why isn’t there a judging course complete with videos and a BJM type guy leading it and explaining what counts for what and why. If they had that, there would still be “open to interpretation” moves but there would certainly be more consistency than what now exists.