LAS VEGAS – In an unusual turn, Nevada State Athletic Commission chief Bob Bennett appeared at the post-event press conference for Saturday’s UFC 209 to reaffirm a majority-decision win for welterweight champion Tyron Woodley and call out a judge for a bad score.

Bennett, the commission’s executive director, didn’t name the judge, Sal D’Amato, who scored it a 47-47 draw after five rounds in the pay-per-view headliner at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. But he criticized D’Amato’s fifth round 10-8 score for Woodley (17-3-1 MMA, 7-2-1 UFC) over Stephen Thompson (13-2-1 MMA, 8-2-1 UFC), saying the longtime official “just missed it.”

“Thank God it didn’t affect the overall outcome of the fight,” Bennett told MMAjunkie.

Woodley picked up a majority-decision win with two 48-47 scores in a fight that was widely panned by the public. UFC President Dana White scored the bout three rounds to two for Thompson, who was badly hurt in the fifth and final round.

Commission officials rarely go in front of the media after a fight, though they frequently make themselves available for comment at pre- and post-event press conferences. Bennett, however, said he’d gotten a couple of texts from an unnamed party and chose to appear “just out of respect to the promoters and the fighters.”

Bennett criticized D’Amato after he was asked whether he advised against judges giving a round score of 10-10, a tally that was broached by the media after an incredibly slow start to the welterweight title fight.

Initially, Bennett called the draw score “an anomaly” and said the topic had been addressed prior to the bout, which is no surprise given Woodley’s first bout with Thompson ended in a majority draw. He said a “top-notch, A-plus” judge should be able to decide a winner of each round based on the scoring criteria and noted that in his nearly three-year tenure with the NSAC that no 10-10 scores had been delivered. Yet he denied that his opinion, in effect, encouraged judges to demur on 10-10 scores.

“These judges, just like in the boxing events, you’ve got to score it the way you see it,” he said. “I don’t put any pressure or stress on them; it’s totally incumbent upon them.”

Still, Bennett said he uses a system to track the performance of judges in close rounds, touting it as “one form of measurement as to who your better judges are and who has proven themselves under a lot of pressure.”

Overall, the boxing and MMA chief defended the performance of D’Amato, Derek Cleary and Chris Lee, all longtime officials in Nevada. But on the topic of 10-8 rounds, a score that results when one fighter wins a frame by a significant margin, Bennett said D’Amato’s decision for Woodley was off-base.

“The one judge that had it 10-8 – we went over it in the debriefing, and that 10-8 was unacceptable,” he said. “Not that it would have affected the outcome of the fight, but just to share it with you, we certainly strive to do the best we can – we don’t always succeed – and that judge should have scored that round 10-9.”

A flurry of landed punches from Woodley convinced D’Amato that Thompson’s comfortable margin was transformed into mere survival. But Bennett argued the challenger’s early work shouldn’t be erased.

“You can’t have a three-point swing in 50 seconds,” he said.

As Bennett noted, commission officials regularly train to ensure bouts are scored correctly. As this past Saturday’s fight revealed, it’s not an easy task.

“Usually, he’s spot on,” Bennett said of D’Amato. “In our opinion, which we do for a living, and we don’t have a vested interest in who wins or who loses, we had Mr. Woodley winning 3-2.”

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