The 10-point system - a must? A critique of MMA’s scoring system
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC
Two exhausted fighters pace slowly through the cage, after the final bell has sounded. A cornerman raises their fighter’s hand in celebration. Perhaps this is because they are proud of their effort and performance. Perhaps they want to demonstrate confidence in the yet to be announced outcome. Perhaps it is some last ditch effort to persuade a judge. Perhaps it’s all of the above. There is a murmur amongst the crowd as fans discuss their opinions in anticipation of the judges and ring announcer “making it official”. The fight was close, after all. One fighter seemed to control the pace and throw more strikes. The other fighter seemed to have the more impactful shots, but honestly it’s hard to be sure. He also secured a few takedowns and seemed to end up on top in the ensuing scrambles. He did, however, also get attacked with a few ultimately unsuccessful submissions. One seemed like it might have been truly threatening, but there’s no way to know.
The fighters are now at center ring, each with one arm in the hand of the referee. Neither seems confident, but both seem hopeful. The announcer reads the judges’ decision. A split. The winner is decided by one point, on one card. The fighters embrace, both knowing there was no real winner or loser in this contest - but one would only receive half of his potential purse. The typical MMA pay structure is a 50/50 split between your guaranteed fight purse and your win bonus. The losing fighter will carry the pressure of a “must-win” situation in their next bout, for fear of losing their job. The other makes their full purse and moves on to higher profile bouts. This can be victory or defeat in modern mixed martial arts.
There are plenty of issues present in this scenario, from the pay structure in MMA to the general competency and training of judges. Today I want to specifically focus on the ten-point must system. This is a system where the winner of a round gets ten points, while the loser gets nine or less, all based on “effective striking, grappling, aggression, and octagon* control”.
*Cage or ring control is usually substituted for octagon, but it’s mandatory for me to read and hear it in the fashion Mike Goldberg delivered it, and you should all follow suit.
We can analyze significant drawbacks to the ten-point must in MMA by comparing how it is used in boxing and kickboxing. Boxing uses the same system. In fact, MMA just transplanted this system from the sweet science. In boxing, the points are awarded the same way but scoring is based on clean punches, effective aggression, defense, and ring generalship. Scoring a 10-8 round in boxing is generally much more definitive, as they have the referee officially declare a knockdown with a break in action and usually a mandatory 8 count. Two knockdowns in a round can be scored 10-7, and so on. In MMA, there is no break in the event of a knockdown, no official declaration of a knockdown, and the action continues uninterrupted. More often than not, knockdowns in MMA do not result in a 10-8 round, and in many cases, I think I agree with it not being a two-point advantage on its own. Scoring an even 10-10 round is taboo in both boxing and MMA, mainly based on an industry-wide preference for not having fights end in draws. The truth is that many fights deserve to end in draws.
Judging fights isn’t a science. It’s inherently subjective. If I’m looking for clean, effective punches, how do I determine that? Was one fighter’s jab to the head cleaner and more effective than the other’s jab to the body? Does my experience of disliking getting hit to the body play into my decision? Does me having my nose broken by a jab once? Do you like front foot pressure fighters or slick out-fighters? How much credit do you give for crafty defense versus general aggression? Everyone has their own opinions and biases on these matters, but there are only three opinions that count on fight night. From the fighter’s perspective, they are essentially random opinions. No one is going to change the fact that judging is subjective. It’s part of it, for better or worse.
Let us take the difficulty of weighing one punch versus another or several punches of seeming middling power versus one that looks like it landed harder and extrapolate that to include many, many more techniques and attacking options. In MMA, you have to be able to appropriately weigh a head- snapping punch, a thudding leg kick, a body folding knee, a slicing elbow, a grinding takedown on the cage, a soaring slam, immobilizing control on the ground, sharp strikes off the back, crafty submission attempts, the list goes on. The vast array of techniques and strategies drastically complicates the process of weighing impactful and effective attacks.
To make matters worse, MMA judges have to use the same scoring system and criteria to judge a far more complicated dynamic over a longer period of time. Boxing rounds are three minutes in duration, while MMA rounds are five minutes. So, fifteen minutes of MMA action is represented by three scores, while fifteen minutes of boxing action is represented by five scores. To be clear, I am not suggesting the longer rounds in MMA is a negative (quite the opposite), but I am saying that the structure of MMA bouts, paired with the ten-point must system, is compounding some of the already difficult issues with judging.
This leads me to the final comparison, and my last point. As fighters rise through a professional boxing career, the bouts generally progress in the number of rounds. Boxers move from four, to six, to eight, to ten, and finally to twelve rounds for championship level fights. By contrast, professional MMA bouts are three rounds all the way up to championship or main event-level fights, where they are five rounds. In a boxing match, if a judge makes a mistake, or misses something, or just has an atypical interpretation of the action and scores one round in a different direction, this makes up only 1/10th or 1/12th of the overall score. This is obviously a much smaller fraction of the total compared to MMA’s 1/3 or 1/5. To have the same impact, a boxing judge would have to make many mistakes, miss much of the action, or see many more rounds differently.
As an example, three judges scoring a boxing bout could score 98-92, 97-93, 96-94 and it would still be a clear cut unanimous decision for one of the fighters. This differential in scoring in an MMA fight would result in a split decision, 30-27, 29-28, 28-29. The point being - any mistake or differing interpretation has a much bigger impact as it represents a larger fraction of the total. The significantly more complicated nature of the combat, the longer duration of the rounds, the smaller number of rounds, the ambiguity of a potential 10-8 round, and the typical pay structure, all combine to make the ten-point must system far less suitable for MMA than it is for boxing.
There are some alternative scoring methods, such as scoring the fight as a whole, like Pride FC used to do, and the half point system. I’ve never watched a fight being scored under the half-point system, but perhaps this could be slightly better. I have also seen kickboxing bouts where they use five judges instead of three, to reduce the impact of stray scores. There is also talk of trying open scoring, but that has little to do with the issues we’ve discussed today.
I’m really not here to advocate for a specific new system, just to do what I do best - complain.