It’s Round 2 of a women’s catchweight bout between Jamielene Nievara and Stephanie Frausto on May 13 at Bellator 154, and I’ve already disagreed once with the judge sitting next to me.

Brandon Saucedo, a guy who gets paid to judge MMA in California, sports a well-trimmed beard, a black suit and a background in MMA. He’s slightly elevated on a chair that sits just behind Frausto’s corner, so he’s not eager to explain his score the first time I ask. We’re close enough to the cage for a spritz of blood or sweat, and at this prelim bout in the cavernous SAP Center in San Jose, voices carry.

I’m here as one of four participants in a media day arranged by the California State Athletic Commission, whose executive director, Andy Foster, wants to bridge the gap between those who cover the sport and those who regulate it. Or as another official backstage puts it, to help lengthen the amount of time fans think before blaming officials.

As Frausto executes a takedown and works her opponent against the fence, Saucedo confirms sotto voce she got the opening frame. Frausto did a little bit more than Nievara, he explains. Not by much, but enough. I can’t help myself from dissenting.

Frausto certainly was the more active fighter – that I don’t dispute. The younger sister of former Bellator strawweight champ Zoila Frausto is active with punches and kicks. But when she catches a counter from Nievara, she really catches it. Almost instantly, you see the physical damage on her face; I can imagine her brain banging from one side of her skull to the other. In contrast, her offense seems to bounce off Nievara, hardly registered. That’s why I give Nievara that opening round.

In the end, the scorecards won’t matter much as Nievara (4-1 MMA, 1-0 BMMA) catches Frausto (5-6 MMA, 0-1 BMMA) by third-round TKO. But it won’t be the last time I disagree with judges. Two fights later, during a welterweight bout between Sam Spengler (9-5 MMA, 1-0 BMMA) and Doyle Childs (2-2 MMA, 0-1 BMMA), I give the second frame to Childs despite his top control for much of the round. I think the offense from Childs, even from his back, is more significant. I would rather be him than Spengler, who looks positively miserable despite dominant position, taking dozens of hammerfists while trying to land his own shots.

Now, if I were watching the bout on TV, I would have seen it completely different. It would have appeared Spengler got an easy 10-9, racking up points with extended periods of ground and pound. When I ask him for his score, Wade Vierra, the judge sitting next to me, agrees with that assessment, rewarding the fighter’s extended stay up top.

A mere few steps away from the action, however, I can see and feel the strikes that land and those that don’t. When you’re judging MMA, that’s everything.

But then again, I don’t exactly have a lot of time to meditate about what just happened. As soon as each round ends, a pushy CSAC official takes my scorecard. So even though I’ve been prepared for this moment by one of the sport’s most famous and respected regulatory figures, it’s really a split-second judgement call.

After scorecards are collected, it is revealed that Vierra and another judge, Ron McCarthy, gave the fight to Spengler, 30-27. One judge, Mike Guignona, agrees with my tally and dissents with a 29-28 score. No one would argue the right guy won. But there was disagreement on the margin.

Sound familiar?

* * * *

“Big” John McCarthy punches himself in the jaw, four times. They’re not soft shots, either; they make a creepy clicking sound as his fist meets his face. He’s demonstrating the difference between a jab and a cross to explain the qualitative difference between blows. Thankfully, he doesn’t demonstrate the cross.

We’re cooped up in a concrete-walled room off the arena floor that’s used by the commission during the event. In the corner, a hydration scale pings as fighters get checked. McCarthy is teaching a condensed version of his MMA judging course before the fights. If you’re an aspiring official, passing is a seal of approval for many commissions under the umbrella of the Association of Boxing Commissions, including the CSAC. (Full disclosure: I barely passed the course in March 2015.)

The concept that takes sharp focus in McCarthy’s school of MMA judging is effective aggression. More plainly put? Damage. As in, how much damage are you doing to your opponent? Are you moving around and dazzling us with your technique, or are you actually harming the person you’re fighting? Are you fighting, or are you merely surviving?

A takedown, for example, is nothing more than a level change unless it actually hurts its recipient. An escape from armbar isn’t meaningful; it’s the damage done by the application that is.

“I don’t give a (expletive) how well he defended!” the longtime referee bellows. Between Powerpoint slides, his homescreen is a picture of him and his granddaughter, beaming.

It’s fitting McCarthy was a cop and a longtime instructor at the Los Angeles Police Academy. He interrogates. Even things you think you know about MMA, he has a way of making you doubt them merely by repeating what you said. When you’re forced to defend your opinions against a quasi-drill instructor who separates Alistair Overeem and Stefan Struve, your mind goes blank in the stress of the space between his questions and your answer.

That’s perhaps why Dr. Paul Gift, a BloodyElbow.com writer who writes detailed reports about financial and legal documents, locks up when asked to explain a D’Arce choke. He starts well enough, explaining the submission’s setup. But when he claims it’s applied to an opponent attempting to stand up, McCarthy laughs out loud. It doesn’t matter that, in many cases, Gift’s statement is true; a lot of guys get choked as they get up. As the clinical description of an expert, it’s not good enough.

Then again, none of the four MMA media members present, including me, can even offer a description for the “Suloev stretch.” We’ve never even heard of an eviscerator choke. And for that, we all suck.

“Be a student of the game,” McCarthy chastises.

He’s right. After all, if we’re going to be ready for the spotlight that comes with deciding a fighter’s professional fate, there should be no gaps in the knowledge of what we’re judging. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, even though everyone who’s been around for a minute knows it doesn’t.

It should be very clear, for example, what constitutes a 10-8 round. And yet, we continue to see scores that indicate judges are simply unwilling to give them. March’s UFC Fight Night 85 meeting between Neil Magny and Hector Lombard is a fight that saw a wild swing in momentum from Round 1 to Round 2. In McCarthy’s course, its second round is distinguished as one of only two 10-7 rounds in modern MMA history. Yet not only did judges not score it that way, they all scored it 10-9 for Magny, whose unanswered punches on Lombard prompted criticism of the referee for allowing the fight to continue.

According to McCarthy, a 10-8 score results from a round won by a large, but not overwhelming, margin. It requires dominance – one fighter being the more effective aggressor – and damage as a consequence of that aggression. Although McCarthy recently added “duration” as a measure of a 10-8, he doesn’t claim there’s a specific amount of time one needs to validate the other two conditions. The score results when a significant gap exists between the fighters’ efforts to end the fight, when one fighter’s is largely offensive and the other is defensive.

It’s nevertheless easy to misinterpret the action in the cage. Gilbert Melendez’s trip to the canvas in the third round, courtesy of madman Diego Sanchez’s uppercut, is interpreted by one media member as a pivotal scoring point by in a screening of their UFC 166 barnburner. McCarthy demands to know why. And gets silence.

“You’ve gotta tell me! You’re a judge!” he bellows.

The answer, after a pause, is that on video, it looked like Melendez was hurt, and Sanchez got to his back. But in truth, what happened was that Melendez braced himself for that fall, turned to avoid a choke once he hit the mat, and got right back in the fight he was winning up until that point. Totally different than a round-winning shot.

In New Jersey, the state’s athletic commission experimented with the idea of putting judges in soundproof rooms. The theory, it seems, is take out the distraction of the audience, and you get more clear-headed scores. But the thing that becomes clear very quickly in McCarthy’s course is the value of proximity. By being close to the action, you can hear qualitative differences that tell the real story of who’s winning the fight, or who’s the more effective fighter.

The position isn’t perfect, of course. A judge inevitably will miss a critical fight sequence simply because of the fighter’s position in the cage. A cageside monitor provided by the commission – if a monitor is even offered – won’t give critical information. And sometimes, the action moves so fast, it’s hard to measure and weigh each fighter’s offense.

Because of that, there are bound to be some scorecards that make you wonder if the judges saw the same fight, and chances are, they didn’t. But for now, it’s the system we have – flawed, and frequently under revision.

As of late, McCarthy and several MMA industry veterans who head the ABC’s Rules Committee are trying to pass a rule that will penalize a fighter for keeping his or her fingers outstretched, requiring them to clench their fist or keep their fingers pointed upward. They are also trying to redefine a “grounded opponent” by eliminating handsy games fighters play to avoid a knee to the head in a front headlock.

Taking McCarthy’s course connects you to a network of other officials who constantly debrief and debate their work and the work of others. The veteran referee’s cell phone is always ringing with officials looking for an opinion, which he will give if you ask. But he might also offer it for free. He certainly did with a notoriously inept official, Kim Winslow, after a 2010 fight in Strikeforce between current Invicta FC featherweight champ and UFC fighter Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino and Jan Finney, a mauling immortalized as the other 10-7 round in MMA. You’ll watch that near-catastrophe as a case study, and if you’re taking his referee course, as an example of what not to do.

Heads up: The Suloev stretch and eviscerator choke will also be on the test.

* * * *

Cageside after Spengler vs. Childs, I confer with Foster on the media scores, and he shows me a summary of our cards. I’m the lone dissenter, it turns out. I have it 29-28 for Spengler while Gift and Joshua Saenz from MMA Complex have it 30-26 for Spengler. Suddenly, I’m the guy refusing to give out 10-8s.

Gift tells me it was Spengler’s last-second attempt at Peruvian necktie, which actually brought a post-bell tap, that was damaging enough to warrant the wider margin. It’s an interesting take since I didn’t even consider the move, believing it hadn’t been applied long enough to do damage. On the other hand, Childs may have proved it was significant by tapping seconds later, even though it didn’t count. It was a judgment call.

Meanwhile, my argument that Childs did more damage from the bottom in the second frame is drawing polite smiles. To others, there’s no question Spengler won the round.

Unfortunately, my event coverage duties prevented me from scoring main-card bouts, and I miss a post-event debrief in which our scores are discussed. According to Gift’s report, it’s not clear whether the professionals are swayed by his 10-8 argument; Foster notes that there should be no thinking in delivering that score, because by the criteria set forth, judges will know when they’re obligated to give that score (easier said than done, Andy).

I’d like to think the judge who agreed with my 29-28 score was closest to the action, and both felt and saw the effectiveness of Childs’ offense against Spengler in that second round. But maybe that’s the score that got mocked.

In the night’s main event, a title eliminator between light heavyweight Phil Davis over Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal, the fight goes to the scorecards and produces a minor controversy. Backstage, the consensus, according to McCarthy, is that Lawal won the first round and Davis won the last two. Only one judge scores it the same, with the other two giving Davis all three rounds. Meanwhile, five of six MMA media members judging at home saw it 29-28 for Lawal. So, not only disagreement on the margin, but the winner.

In other words, a typical night outside the cage, judging MMA fights.

For more on Bellator 154, stay tuned to the MMA Events section of the site.