Photo by Mark Nolan/Zuffa LLC

2015, the year of MMA enlightenment, is closing strong.

After the UFC introduced a comprehensive new performance-enhancing-drug-testing program in February and banned the use of IV rehydration during weight-cutting this fall and Singapore-based fight promotion ONE Championship went a step further and banned the use of dehydration last week following the death of one of its fighters, the race to drag our beloved sport into the realm of rationality and decency is starting to take on a life of its own. This time the issue isn’t the sport’s absurd take on weight-cutting but rather its maddening relationship to fight scoring. Yesterday South Korean promotion ROAD FC announced that it will be doing away with the infamous “10-point must” scoring system codified under the Unified Rules of MMA and used by just about every fight organization in the world in favor of what it calls an “Unlimited Points System” aimed at increasing action in the cage and doing away with the much-maligned “scoring-by-rounds” approach that MMA long ago inherited from boxing.

According to ROAD Planning Director Jake Kwon the reason for the change is simple: the crowd’s hunger for more action.

“These days, many fighters just keep their position on the ground to take the points, but our audience doesn’t like that type of fight,” Kwon said. “They want excitement, so we want to encourage our fighters to be more exciting. That’s why we changed the system they will be judged by.”

Under the terms of the current system, judges are required to award 10 points to the winner of each round (minus deductions for fouls) and nine points or fewer to the loser. While in boxing, judges know they have to take a point away from a losing fighter for each time s/he gets knocked down, things get murky in MMA, where it’s not at all clear when a judge should be scoring a round 10-8 (what exactly is the definition of “overwhelming domination”?). As a result, critics say, there’s no nuance or clarity or rationality to MMA scoring. One fighter could beat up another for five solid minutes and walk away with the same score as his opponent after two rounds if that opponent secures just one meaningless takedown at the end of an otherwise uneventful second round. According to Jake Kwon (and millions of MMA fans) the current system lends itself to fighters fighting to win rounds, not fights: looking for takedowns and control rather than knockouts and thrills, laying-and-praying our beloved sport into a coma of tedium. ROAD FC’s new system, based on a clear (if convoluted) point-award and point-deduction system, is designed to encourage the opposite: which is mayhem, I suppose.

“After two or three events [under the new regime],” Kwon said, “there won’t be any fighters who want to keep the fight on the ground just to wait out the points. Actually, they will be losing points and that is totally different from the way they are used to fighting. … We devised this judging system to bring MMA back to its original intent. MMA has become highly developed and many fighters are very skillful, but this has sacrificed some of the excitement for the wider audience. The intent of the new point system, including the penalties deducted for stalling and for not engaging in action, is to encourage the fighters to finish their fights.” ROAD FC, as sure as Antonin Scalia with his Constitution, are true MMA originalists.

So, starting with this Saturday’s ROAD FC 27 event in China, judges working ROAD events will be awarding one point for every clear connecting strike (legal punch, kick, knee), successful takedown, full mount or back mount position achieved, incident of clear control in ground position, near submission, and act of clear aggression. Five points will be given for each clear connecting strike that results in a knockdown and each slam that causes damage.

As for the punitive system Kwon promised: fighters will be deducted five points for each “yellow card” penalty—use or attempted use of an illegal technique; second strike to the groin, intentional or non-intentional; or the deliberate attempt to halt the fight—and two points for each “blue card” penalty, such as deliberately failing to engage in striking and deliberately stalling in a grounded position by holding.

MMA fans here in the highly regulated United States who have a problem with the current 10-point-must system can only hope that ROAD’s experiments are successful enough to force changes to the current Unified Rules, which it was necessary for the UFC and other promotions to sign off on (including a scoring system regulators who were used to boxing could understand) in order to achieve the regulatory and legal legitimacy they were looking for back in the dark ages of the sport. But for those dreaming of a similar unilateral push toward clarity and enlightenment, remember that the UFC and Bellator don’t get to make decisions about judging and scoring systems like ROAD FC does. In America, that’s the work of the state athletic commissions. Even if the UFC wanted to change the rules to increase action in the cage and decrease confusion outside it, they would have to go through the states to do it. Which could take months, even years, if it ever happened at all.

For now, as 2015 ends, let’s just revel in this new spirit of experimentation and our long-wished-for Age of Reason and look forward to the day when liquid-starved, steroid-infused, laying-and-praying mixed martial artists are a thing of the deep, dark past.

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