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Everyone who follows MMA is well aware by now that there is a serious problem with MMA judging. The current crop of judges appointed by the state athletic commissions are, to a large extent, incapable of accurately assessing who is winning a round. Takedowns and blindly charging forward are ridiculously over rated, while counter-striking, defending takedowns, and attacking from the bottom are all woefully neglected. If this wasn't painfully obvious by now, the ridiculously terrible 30-27 card in the Warren/Galvao fight is irrefutable proof. The 29-28 cards are clearly wrong, but I can at least see an argument for why the fight would be scored that way; the 30-27 is inexcusable though.

The key question that everyone is grappling with is what can be done to fix this? Various suggestions have been thrown around: give the judges monitors, improve the scoring guidelines, more 10-8 rounds, more judges, award half points, etc. While many of the proposed ideas are good, and should be taken into consideration, they ignore the fact that the judges who currently score fights do not know what to look for when judging a fight. Until this is addressed, no real substantive improvements can be made.

Unfortunately, given how glaringly inept the judges are, I'm skeptical towards the prospects of educating them. Cecil Peoples has refereed and judged a huge number of fights; if he doesn't know what to look for by now, then there's really no hope.

So what should we do? I say ignore them. Hire a new 5-man panel of judges, pulled from the ranks of former fighters. Have these judges score the bout, alongside the judges appointed by the athletic commission. When it comes time to announce the decision, use the panel's scores. Use their decisions to decide the winner of titles, and to judge a fighter's ranking. The official records will stand, but given how terrible many of the decisions rendered by the state judges are, the 'unofficial record' could soon become a more authoritative source of MMA record keeping.

The judges would, officially, be employees of Zuffa. If Zuffa is serious about the judging issue, the additional expense of paying for these judges is negligible. There are a ton of former fighters, and soon to be retired fighters, that would probably jump at the chance to maintain a connection to the sport. Their experience in the sport would allow them to (more) accurately assess who is the proper winner of a fight.

Some considerations:

Judges will need a measure of independence from Zuffa to maintain impartiality. Appoint them for 4 year terms, and guarantee their salary and job security. Maybe institute a recall measure to get rid of bad judges through fan voting.

Potential judges should, ideally, have experience in all areas of MMA. Judges who were one-dimensional fighters would be more likely to give greater weight to their area of expertise.

Allow judges to recuse themselves from fights where they may have a conflict of interest, either because they trained with or were close to one of the fighters they will be judging. Have an extra judge on stand-by for when this happens, or use a 3-judge panel for that fight.



To ensure consistency, I'd like to see the same panel used for all events. Fighters would gain a measure of predictability so that they can better judge how the fight is scored while it's going on.

Obviously this is really only practical (due to expense) for the largest fight promotions, so it could really only apply to Zuffa. Given that Zuffa pretty much equals MMA at this point in time, I don't see a huge problem with leaving the smaller promotions in the dark on this one though.

I'm writing largely fueled by rage over this decision, and this idea kind of just popped into my head, so it's not very well thought out at this point, but I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this. Is it feasible? Are there major issues I missed? Are there specific fighters you think would make a good judge, and would be willing to take the job? Leave a comment and let me know.

-MS-DOS Santos