If you wanted to boil it way down, the bottom line is, judging a fight is basically a person giving their opinion. That being said, just like other arenas in life, some opinions are more educated than others. It’s always interesting to see talk with people and hear their perspectives on what wins a fight or a round in MMA. Alot of people assume that in a ground fight that the fighter in top position is winning but that depends. Being on top gives you the ability to generate more velocity and thus do more damage with strikes but if you’re just holding top position and not doing alot and the bottom fighter is busier throwing elbows or getting legitimate submission attempts then you can be losing from top position. On the subject of submission attempts, squeezing something, or trying to bend something, does not a submission attempt make. I’m talking about triangle chokes where the foot is behind the knee and the fighter trapped in the triangle is in real trouble of tapping/passing out. You get the idea, a true submission attempt brings you close to ending the fight or at least has the other fighter in real trouble and damage has been inflicted.
Another thing to look for in who’s winning a fight is damage, whether it’s from submission attempts or strikes or slams, the fighter who has inflicted the most damage during a round will typically win it. Now of course there are exceptions, if a fighter is getting pounded on for 4:59 seconds but doesn’t get cut and yet he happens to land a grazing elbow that opens a cut and that’s the extent of his offense then of course in spite of the visible damage I’m still going to score the round for the fighter who dominated the vast majority of the round.
Defense doesn’t win you jack squat in a fight. Stuffing takedowns and slipping punches and pulling out of submissions is good for survival but in all these instances you’re still the one on the run, the other fighter is on the offensive and is the one scoring points. It’s amazing to me how many people get this one wrong. EFFECTIVE aggression is the name of the game, period. That’s the other part, being busier doesn’t mean you’re necessarily winning either. If all your punches are just moving the air around inside the cage and not hitting your opponent, you’re not scoring either because you’re not being effective in your aggression.
When scoring a round you also have to look at where most of the fight took place. So if 4:30 seconds took place standing and one fighter dominated the other in that area, and only :30 took place on the ground, even if the other fighter got the better of the ground, it doesn’t count for as much because you have to give the gravity of the scoring to where the majority of the fight happened. Of course all these things are subjective and there’s SO many things that can happen in an MMA fight that there’s just some that are super close and you could make a valid argument for either side and so you end up with split decisions or draws and that’s just the way it goes when guys are well matched, and if we’re being honest, some fights end in controversy because nobody went balls to the wall, both guys played it safe and didn’t give the judges alot to go on. It happens. Sometimes the energy and nature between two fighters is to have that type of a fight that night.
Each judge has their own background, their own perspectives, their own thoughts and opinions as to how much gravity to award to certain aspects in a fight and their own imperfections. Because we’re human, we’re gonna disagree, and hell, maybe even get it wrong on occasion. Ref’s call fights too early, or too late, they miss fouls, and so on, judges are no different, sometimes their position with regard to seating causes them to miss something crucial, it happens. All we can do is all we can do, we truly do love and care about the sport, at least, the judges in my own inner circle do. We take our own time to attend seminars and we try to maintain laser-like focus during the course of the fight we’re judging because we understand there’s alot on the line, and alot of hours and money have been invested in the outcome and we know it’s important to make the right call when we turn in our cards. Bottom line for me is, no matter who the hometown favorite is, no matter who was supposed to win on paper, I have to turn in a card at the end of the fight that lets my conscience be at ease and get a good nights sleep knowing I did the best I could by the fighters that night.
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