New Rules, Part One: Methods To Improve The Judging System In MMA

In addition to the further education of judges on the intricacies of MMA, a phenomenon which is taking place at the behest of referee "Big" John McCarthy through his course on judging and refereeing termed COMMAND (Certification of Officials for Mixed Martial Arts Development), adding judges to ringside from a technical point of view can only have a positive effect since skewered outcomes will be harder to come by with more judges needed to create an unsatisfactory decision.

Split decision scores such as three judges to two or four to three will still occur, but some pressure will be taken off of individual judges since they won't have as big a weight on them to pick the "correct" winner, though of course mistakes will always be made and controversial decisions will still occur, due to the subjective nature of the matter.

Then again, when one looks at polls which ask who fans think won a particular fight, results are often close to 50-50 and in this case the addition of judges will not fully eliminate the problem of scoring evenly-matched contests.

But the reason why we have three judges is to decrease incidences of bias and favoritism that would occur if only one judge was employed, and ideally I would like to see as many judges utilized as can be feasible both economically and logistically.

Such an emphasis is placed not only on winning but also on entertaining the crowd such that a single loss can have a huge detriment to one's career as every fighter strives not to lose their place within the organization and while trying to earn a decent living.

Nobody likes to see a fighter screwed over by an unjust decision and though this will always be inevitable to some extent, theoretically there are certain ways to minimize such instances and I believe adding extra judges can be an effective method that perhaps ought to be at least tried.

It is difficult enough to climb the ladder towards a title shot let alone compete professionally on a full-time basis and when a combatant is "robbed" unjustly then the credibility of the sport and the judges are put into question, and we certainly do not want to see any sort of corruption within the system either.

Thus the addition of judges can create the equitable atmosphere that is necessary to provide a just scoring system and though it may amount to only being a minor improvement, it can make all the difference in the world for a select few fighters who had that one extra judge on their side in a fight that they desperately needed to win and perhaps would have lost in a three-judge format.

Proposition:  Weigh the Judging Criteria According to a Standardized Quantitative System

The criteria used to score a match obviously have great importance when it comes to creating a judging system which can be both universal and just. The goal here is to make the criteria as objective and transparent as possible so that fans and competitors alike will know why a fight was scored in a particular manner.

Of course, MMA employs mostly boxing judges who traditionally tend to favor the striking aspect and are not as well-versed in the ground game as the judges that you would find at a jiu-jitsu tournament, naturally enough.

While this deficiency has certainly improved within the last few years as the ground game is getting scored better, the sport of MMA is an entirely different animal than boxing and I think most fans would agree that the ten-point must system is needs some sort of overhaul in order to satisfactorily represent the nuances of an MMA battle.

Here I wish to discuss the qualitative and quantitative aspects of scoring a fight which every judge will need to take into account when scoring a winner. But I want to make it clear that I do not wish to argue here in favor of one specific criterion over another; I will save that for another time since it is an extremely subjective topic that is difficult to reach a consensus on. 

My proposition is intended to work within the existing framework used for scoring fights and thus I will assume that the criteria used in North American promotions are at least adequate though perhaps not entirely perfect in their arrangement, mostly due to the fact that fights are not scored as a whole which of course would be ideal for a combat engagement.

I will say this though: I believe that the attempt to finish the fight is the most important criterion and it is not sufficiently represented under the current stipulations. 

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