Here is my response. Enjoy guys



"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones"



William Shakespeare Julius Caesar: Act 3, Scene 2



Let me start by saying that I know from experience that judging is a thankless job. The two factors that make scoring a fight particularly difficult are: #1 people only tend to notice your scorecard when they don't agree with it, and #2 no matter HOW you explain your decision, someone will get offended.



King Mo vs. Phil Davis is, in my mind, an excellent example of how fans can be...um...passionate about scorecards in an extremely close fight. Everyone knows that I gave Mo rounds 1 and 2 by the margin of 10-9. I took pains during both rounds (especially round 2) to explain that these were extremely close rounds and, depending on how one saw a couple of minute determining factors, a judge could see it either way. The 3rd round was clearly for Phil Davis by (a 10-8 wouldn't have surprised me).



As a result, I wasn't terribly surprised when the decision went to Phil. I was surprised by the two 30-27 scorecards, but not enough to go on a headset-throwing rampage about it. Most people who saw the fight acknowledged a 29-28 split either way.



The internet, however, does not lend itself to even-handed contemplation. I had people trashing me, my congenital blindness, the incompetence of "Bellator judges" and the sad, corrupt state of the sport. Mo fans thought he was robbed, Phil fans thought i was some combination of blind, inebriated, and ignorant. I often wonder when I read these chat-speak laden criticisms: "Did they listen to a word I said, or do they just read the numbers at the end?"



I understand completely that most people get the idea that the fact that its only a 3-round fight means that MOST 29-28 fights have the potential of going either way. Unlike boxing, there aren't 10-12 rounds of scoring to fall back on and therefore standard statistical deviation is going to lead to more controversial decisions in a 3-round sport. Disagreeing on a single round in boxing is (usually) meaningless, in MMA it is often the difference between victory and defeat.



I generally don't get too emotional about judging. I've seen some bad ones in my time, but I know the difference between a score I disagree with and an outright robbery. The frequency with which people confuse those two things on social media is quite stunning. The ones that were incomprehensibly bad REALLY stand out in my head.



So lets discuss Bellator 155...





"The setting was guaranteed trouble: heaping tubs of beer, wild music and several dozen girls looking for excitement while their husbands and varied escorts wanted to talk about 'alienation' and 'a generation in revolt.' Even a half-dozen [Hells] Angels would have quickly reduced the scene to an intolerable common denominator: Who will get fucked?"



Hunter S. Thompson Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga



When I was a student in a rough high school in the gang-violence infested early 90's, I learned to tell when things were about to go south in a big way. When two guys are staring at each other at the lunch table and both are surrounded by eager friends, you'd better pick a side or take your lunch elsewhere. A storm might break quickly, but the clouds will tell you all you need to know beforehand.



At Bellator 155 my warning came after a fight during the prelims. One guy had finished his opponent with a clean rear-naked choke. There was no mistaking it: both hooks in, nice hip pressure, not even face-down to obscure the submission. The ref saw the tap and the fight was over, but then our cage announcer walks to the cage in front of me before he announces the decision and says "The ref is saying it was a guillotine choke."



If a submission ends a fight, the name of the submission is given to the cage announcer by the referee. He's the guy who was closest and he is supposed to understand what he is seeing enough to communicate to the audience what caused him to stop the fight. Usually this takes place without much issue. Every now and then a ref, or the cage announcer, will ask me for clarification if there is some kind of confusion. In this case the ref was completely confident, he was just dead wrong and the cage announcer wanted an expert opinion to help him clarify his mistake. I immediately took off my headset and said "Rear-naked choke man, no doubt."After some initial resistance, the ref acquiesced in time to get the right submission read on TV.



That was a disturbing moment for me and gave me an inkling that things were not going to go smoothly that night. If I am walking down the street with my pit-bull and someone comments on my adorable chihuahua I will just assume they are under the influence of some strong hallucinogen and continue walking before my dog gets a whiff of their weirdness and rips their leg off. If I walk into my VET'S office and the same comment is made, I get a new vet and double-check my dogs medications. Certain people are expected to know these things and they aren't easily confused.



An inebriated frat-boy watching a PPV at Buffalo Wild Wings after he "trains UFC" can tell the difference between a rear-naked choke and a guillotine. They are not different versions of the same choke and take place in exactly opposite positions. The fact that a referee got them confused, even though he was standing over both fighters and had an even better vantage point than I did, was incomprehensible to me.



It would not be the last incomprehensible moment of the night.



Rob Hinds was one of the judges who gave Raphael Carvalho a split decision win over Melvin Manhoef. I know Rob a bit, he's refereed and judged quite few Bellator shows and as a result we've spoken once or twice about fight-related issues. He's an all-around nice guy, but I was very public about he fact that I thought he completely missed the boat about this fight.



He recently gave an interview to combatpress.com about his thoughts on the fight. He seemed to be surprised at the uproar over the decision:



“It's blown out of proportion more than any of us officials or commission people thought it’d be,” Hinds said. “As lackluster of a fight that it was and how little we had to assess in that fight, I found it extremely weird that people were that angry over it.”



Well, there is the fact that it was a title fight Rob. The anger over the decision was generated by the fact that most people DISAGREED with it and they recognize that a world title was on the line. The gravity of a judgment isn't lessened by the comparative inactivity of the fight: its still someone's paycheck and it's still someone's dream. The fact that he had "little to assess" should have made it comparatively easy. Manhoef didn't do much in that fight, but Carvalho did even less, in fact it was perplexing how little he did given the stakes involved.



“We don’t judge fights. We judge round by round,” Hinds said. “All the damage [Manhoef] did was mostly in the second round and the fifth round. The other three rounds were lackluster with not a lot to go on. The only round we saw different was round four.”



I talked to Rob after the fight and told him directly that it was the worst decision I had ever commentated. His answer was a more succinct version of what is quoted above. In his interview this is the only justification he really makes for seeing the fight the way he did. Read it carefully and you will be as confused as I was after hearing it from his own mouth. He talks about the damage Manhoef did and the how lackluster the other rounds were: there isn't a single WORD about what Raphael Carvalho did to win the fight. No talk of significant strikes, aggression, takedowns, cage control, submission attempts...you know STUFF A FIGHTER HAS TO DO TO WIN A FIGHT. The attitude almost seems to be that Carvalho started out the fight ahead and that it was Manhood's responsibility to convince them he deserved to win, and he didn't do enough. The simple truth is that, as painful as that fight was to watch, a fighter simply has to do more than his opponent and in every statistical category it was a (boring) wipeout. If a basketball game ends with a score of 15-20 it might suck, but the winning team still scored 25% than the other team and deserves to win. If Rob wants to win over a public that has been nearly universal in its condemnation, he should start by telling us what he saw in Carvalho that he felt gave him the win. On that subject he is conspicuously silent.



“Mike Bell was sitting directly on the other side of the cage,” Hinds said. “We talked after the event. He saw things that I didn’t see and I saw things he didn’t have the best angle on. We were quite surprised there was that much controversy over the decision instead of people being upset at the fight not being very good.”



This was a head-scratcher to me. A lot of people on the promotional side of Bellator worry about making a good, competitive, fan-friendly fight: none of them are named Rob Hines. As a fight judge he has ONE job: judging the fight fairly and accurately. The idea that people should give him break because the fight was boring is laughable at best. I didn't recall any of the camera-people dropping their cameras and walking out of the arena out of sheer boredom, I didn't stop commentating, the Bellator girls didn't lay down their round-cards in frustration: everyone kept on doing their jobs. The lack of action in the fight doesn't give the people entrusted with arriving at a fair decision a pass, they are expected to do their jobs like everyone else.



“When I watched it back, all they talked about was Melvin Manhoef,” Hinds said. “When you listen to the commentary, it’s directed to Manhoef. Obviously, when there’s a split decision or something like that with them being upset by it, it definitely gets the fan base riled up. Definitely the way [they] handled it was unprofessional and a shame for them to deal with it that way.”



Lets start with one fundamental inaccuracy: I talked about Carvalho plenty. The fact is that none of what I said was very positive. By the end of the fight I was just about BEGGING for him to do something to defend a title that he had claimed he was so passionate about keeping. When the champ walks away from a challenger with time still left on the clock it would be an INSULT to the fans who know about MMA to be anything but critical, and critical we were.



The idea that Sean Grande and I "riled up" the fan base is countered by two simple facts. The first is that the live fans in attendance, who have no idea how I called the fight, lost their minds when the decision was read. The boos were loud enough to make my seat vibrate. The second is that we are talking about MMA FANS!! Maybe as an MMA judge who is rarely on camera he doesn't have much experience with them, but let me tell you something Rob: no fanbase on EARTH is more opinionated than MMA fans!! None!! They are ridiculously, unfathomably, unbelievably opinionated about everything to do with the sport they love.They communicate their heartfelt beliefs more strongly than a vegan, born-again Christian, crossfit fanatic! Sometimes they love me, other times they hate me, but I never have to wonder which it is. I know we are convenient scapegoats, but the idea that I could sway the Bellator masses with my Svengali-esque mind-control powers is an idea that only takes hold if you have ZERO experience with this sport and its followers.



The term "unprofessional" means "below or contrary to the standards expected in a particular profession". Perhaps the wires got a little crossed here. My job is to talk about the ins and outs of an MMA bout and translate the experience to the fans through the lens of my experience in the sport. I don't have to agree with the judges or anyone else. If a fighter is running, cheating, or not fighting in the fashion necessary to win then its my JOB to call the fight as I see it. Bellator deserves a lot of credit for letting me speak my mind on-air. One may disagree with what I'm saying when I have that head-set on, but NO ONE can claim I don't mean it. Being critical of the fighters, the judges, and the referees is the very DEFINITION of being professional at my job.



Rob Hind's job was to arrive at fair decision that reflected the action in the fight. A unanimous decision might be fairly common in MMA, but among the fans it is a true rarity. When Compustrike, a tabulating service that is used by boxing and MMA that has ZERO affiliation with the promotion, is so dumbfounded by the decision the they tweet about it: something has gone off the rails. I wrote earlier about the wide variety of responses I got about the King Mo/Phil Davis decision. The responses I got, and read elsewhere, about this decision were not varied at all. The judges for this fight have done something almost no one can ever do: unite the MMA fans behind a decision. They have been been nearly universal in their distaste and condemnation of it on every platform at their disposal.



I will leave it to the fans to decide who was unprofessional.