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Quote: MMA Judges Should Be Investigated By Federal Governments

MMA coach André Pederneiras thinks law enforcement should actively investigate how judges score fights in the Octagon. 2022 was a rough year for MMA judges. From controversial decisions to the harsh criticism of Douglas Crosby, MMA judging has been in …

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St-Pierre vs. Hendricks: The Most Important Bad Decision In UFC History

(Ladies and gentlemen, your “winner.” / Photo via Esther Lin, MMAFighting)

By Adam Martin

There have been many terrible decisions handed out by MMA judges over the years, but none of them had the same consequences as the decision read by UFC ring announcer Bruce Buffer following the main event of UFC 167 this past weekend.

After five rounds of back-and-forth action, Johny Hendricks and Georges St-Pierre headed to the scorecards to hear the official outcome of their fight, which should have been in the bag for the challenger. Watching the fight live, I scored it 48-47 for Hendricks, giving him rounds one, two and four, and St-Pierre rounds three and five, all rounds scored 10-9. My friend and fellow journalist James Lynch, whose judgment I trust and who I watched the event with, tallied the same score on his card. So did all 15 media members who had their scores counted by the great database MMADecisions.com. So did most fans and observers of the sport on Twitter and in the arena. So did UFC color commentator Joe Rogan. And so did UFC president Dana White.

Despite this, two Nevada State Athletic Commission judges inexplicitly scored the fight for St-Pierre by scores of 48-47, and the champion got to keep his belt. He then announced to the audience at MGM Grand Garden Arena that he wanted to take some time off after defending his belt for the third time in the past 12 months.

Hendricks, on the other hand, got screwed.

(Ladies and gentlemen, your “winner.” / Photo via Esther Lin, MMAFighting)

By Adam Martin

Hendricks, on the other hand, got screwed.

I thought all five rounds were clear. Round one was Hendricks’ because he was the more effective striker and grappler. Round two was Hendricks’ because he rocked GSP and displayed more effective striking overall. Round three was GSP’s because he outlanded Hendricks by nearly twice the amount of strikes. Round four was Hendricks’ because he was the more effective striker once again. And the fifth and final round belonged to GSP, who made a late comeback highlighted by two successful takedowns.

For some reason, though, it seems that there is some disagreement with the first round. Although I thought it was clearly Hendricks’ round when I watched it live, two judges — Tony Weeks and Sal D’Amato — gave it to St-Pierre, and it ended up being the round that swung the split-decision verdict in his favor.

24 hours after the fight, I re-watched it, hoping that I was wrong and that the first round was closer than I remembered. And as I watched those first five minutes unfold, I could only sit there and shake my head in disbelief that two professional judges could score the round for St-Pierre. Hendricks won the first round, no doubt about it.

In the first few minutes of round one, St-Pierre landed some nice strikes and a takedown. He then attempted a submission while Hendricks was standing up, but wasn’t able to lock it in. In the Unified Rules of MMA, submission attempts aren’t scored by the judges. Effective grappling is, but having an arm around someone’s neck for a few seconds isn’t effective at all. And neither was that takedown that GSP landed early in the round, because Hendricks used his butterfly guard to get back up almost immediately.

What was effective, however, were the big elbows Hendricks landed to the side of GSP’s head while the champion tried to take him down against the side of the cage. Look at UFC matchmaker Joe Silva’s reaction outside the cage at that moment — he knew those hurt. Then Hendricks got a takedown of his own. Then he landed a bunch of big knees to GSP’s body. And while St-Pierre landed a few nice kicks on Hendricks, the challenger landed a bunch of hard punches at the end of the round, putting an exclamation mark on it and winning a competitive, but at the same time clear, 10-9 round.

Or at least most people thought he did did. Viewing Twitter, there were a few fans who gave St-Pierre the first round 10-9, but they were in the minority (about 10-20% of people I would say, but they are fans and I bet most have never actually read the rulebook). Still, mostly everyone gave round one to 10-9 Hendricks. But two of the judges did not, and at the end of the day that’s the only thing that matters in this sport.

I’ve seen a lot of people say that the first round was close in their minds and therefore the round should be scored in the champion’s favor. So listen up, jackasses: There is NOTHING in the Unified Rules that says, “To be the champ you have to decisively beat the champ.” It’s made-up logic by people who don’t know how to properly score a competitive round. In a mixed martial arts fight, the only thing that matters is who won the round and who lost it. The belt is completely irrelevant and should never be taken into consideration when judging fights.

I am bothered by the decision the judges made, but I am more bothered by the reaction of the MMA community to the decision. When the president of the UFC, 95 percent of professional fighters, 95 percent of the media, and most fans scored the fight for Hendricks, I’m sorry, but that’s a robbery. If this wasn’t a robbery, then someone please tell me what is.

Monday morning on Twitter, a follower told me to move on and to stop flooding his timeline with talk about the decision because “bad decisions happen. It’s a part of the sport.” But this is such flawed logic in so many ways. If we can’t discuss the judging in the sport in a civil manner on a public forum it will never improve. If we keep letting the judges get away with screwing up, and let them off with not even a slap on the wrist every time, the sport will never evolve. And we will keep getting bad decisions where someone who deserved to win gets screwed.

When there are discussions about the worst decisions in UFC history, there are usually a few usual suspects that are brought up. Michael Bisping vs. Matt Hamill at UFC 75. Lyoto Machida vs. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua at UFC 104. Nam Phan vs. Leonard Garcia at the TUF 12 Finale. Frankie Edgar vs. Benson Henderson at UFC 150. Henderson vs. Gilbert Melendez at UFC on FOX 7. The were all horrible decisions, and it’s hard to say that Hendricks vs. St-Pierre was worse than any of them. They’re all about on par, because in each case the wrong man got his hand raised. That’s why I can’t say that Hendricks vs. GSP is the worst decision in UFC history.

But out of all the bad decisions handed down in UFC history, St-Pierre vs. Hendricks is the most important because the stakes were the highest and because it featured the biggest star in the sport on the sport’s biggest stage, the main event of the UFC’s 20th-anniversary pay-per-view card. And because of two bad judges, Hendricks was robbed of the chance to wear a belt he deserved to win. This wasn’t St-Pierre’s fault, and he shouldn’t be blamed for the judges’ incompetence, but at the same time I don’t consider him the best welterweight in the world anymore, even though he still gets to wear the belt around his waist.

I’m hopeful that because of the high-profile nature of this fight that everyone in the MMA community can take a step back and look at the judging in the sport and realize that it’s actually gotten worse in the 20 years since the sport began. That’s a huge problem if we want the sport to succeed going forward.

Hopefully this is the moment where we all open our eyes to a huge problem that has been plaguing the sport for years. We need to have an open forum to try and fix this problem. Maybe that means the scoring system must change. Maybe we need to go back to PRIDE rules. Maybe damage has to be added to the criteria. I don’t know what the solution is, but I want to find one. And so should all of us, instead of just brushing it off to the side. Because it’s wrong and it’s hurting the sport.

Until anything changes, though, we are stuck with the 10-point must system. The system isn’t perfect, but for the most part it works, because under the current system one judge, nearly every media member and the president of the UFC was able to still crown Hendricks as the rightful winner. No, it’s not the system that’s the biggest problem, it’s the judges who are applying the scores incorrectly that is the problem.

I know that judging MMA fights isn’t easy and that the judges in this sport never get any credit for the job they do. But they chose to do the job, and they should do it right. And at UFC 167, they failed at it. But it won’t hurt any of them at all. Most likely, they will all keep their jobs and there will be no ramifications. In actuality, the only person it hurts is Hendricks. And it’s not fair. It’s not right, and we need to change things. How we can do that, though, is a difficult question to answer. But hopefully we can answer it sooner than later before this sport goes right to hell. That is, if it’s not down there already.

Man, Isn’t Boxing Corrupt? Anyway, The Judge Who Scored UFC on FOX 7 Main Event for Melendez Runs a Cesar Gracie Affiliate School

(Vierra is standing third from the right in the black gi, next to Cesar Gracie. / Photo via MixedMartialArts.com)

Following the conclusion of UFC on FOX 7 on Saturday, many die-hard fight fans switched their dials to Showtime to watch the WBA light-middleweight title fight between rising boxing star Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez and Austin Trout. Though Trout arguably won a majority of the early rounds, the fight’s “open-scoring” system revealed that the judges were in the bag for Alvarez from the beginning. When the match was over, the scores came back unanimously for the 22-year-old ginger: 115-112, 116-111 and a completely batshit 118-109 from judge Stanley Christodoulou. As usual, we MMA types used the opportunity to take potshots at boxing’s endemic corruption.

Alright, so get a load of this shit: Late Saturday night, Ben Henderson’s brother pointed out that Wade Vierra — the dissenting judge in Henderson’s split-decision win over Gilbert Melendez — is a “Master Instructor” for the GracieFighter network, and runs a Cesar Gracie affiliate school in Roseville, California. Considering that Melendez is a well-known Cesar Gracie product, the conflict-of-interest alarms should have been ringing for the California State Athletic Commission, and Vierra shouldn’t have been allowed to judge the fight. But the CSAC didn’t catch it, or didn’t care, or hey, maybe they were in on it. Either way, Bendo’s special night was put in jeopardy.

When judging controversies happen in MMA, fans usually chalk it up to ignorance rather than corruption. But when ignorance from MMA judges and commissions is allowed to exist indefinitely, that is corruption — it’s a corruption of the sport’s legitimacy, even if nobody’s directly profiting from it. Obviously, the UFC lightweight title fight was so close that Vierra’s 48-47 tally for Melendez was much more defensible than Christodoulou’s 118-109 for Canelo. Still, the incident gave the UFC event an appearance of commission malfeasance that reflects very poorly on the promotion and the sport in general. (Was somebody paid off to allow Vierra a spot on the judges’ table? Or is the CSAC just that inept?)

It’s a good thing Henderson won. Otherwise, we might have had a scandal on our hands.

(Vierra is standing third from the right in the black gi, next to Cesar Gracie. / Photo via MixedMartialArts.com)

It’s a good thing Henderson won. Otherwise, we might have had a scandal on our hands.

Even Big John McCarthy Thinks the State of MMA Judging/Refereeing is Bullsh*t

(“Gentlemen, I want a good, clean fight. Listen to my commands at all times, protect yourself at all…I’m sorry, did one of you just shit your pants?” Photo via Esporte.)

We hate to keep beating this dead horse*, but the judging over the past couple UFC events has been particularly egregious. While UFC 156 merely suffered from a puzzling split decision or two and a main event that just barely escaped the controversy we predicted it would end in, last weekend’s UFC on FUEL 7 event was a veritable smorgasbord of fatuousness. Thanks in no small to the efforts of judge Aaron Chatfield — who both scored the Che Mills/Matt Riddle fight 29-28 for Mills and gave Paul Sass the first round against Danny Castillo — MMA judging has once again found itself at the center of controversy. That controversy being: Who the hell are these people and how did they waltz into these jobs?

It’s an answer that seems to allude even Big John McCarthy, the all-seeing, all knowing eye of MMA refereeing, who has been forced called out these blind, ignant sons of bitches for being such blind, ignant sons of bitches. Via MMAFighting:

When it comes to the judging, the biggest thing is, judging by nature is subjective. You look at a fight and you have a guy that throws a bunch of punches. One judge — we’ll say [it’s] you — is looking at it, and you’re giving him credit, saying, ‘Wow, he’s really active.’ While I’m looking at it saying, ‘He’s not connecting.’

When you’re looking at the UFC, there’s not a whole lot of excuses. You’ve got a monitor in front of you, so [even] when you can’t see, [you can still see]. That monitor gives them the ability to see a fight from a variety of angles, not just from the one they’re sitting at. And so there’s not a lot of excuses to say, ‘Well, I didn’t see that,’ when it comes to the UFC.

After the jump: McCarthy takes aim at his fellow referees and somehow neglects to mention Jerry Poe.

(“Gentlemen, I want a good, clean fight. Listen to my commands at all times, protect yourself at all…I’m sorry, did one of you just shit your pants?” Photo via Esporte.)

When it comes to the judging, the biggest thing is, judging by nature is subjective. You look at a fight and you have a guy that throws a bunch of punches. One judge — we’ll say [it’s] you — is looking at it, and you’re giving him credit, saying, ‘Wow, he’s really active.’ While I’m looking at it saying, ‘He’s not connecting.’

When you’re looking at the UFC, there’s not a whole lot of excuses. You’ve got a monitor in front of you, so [even] when you can’t see, [you can still see]. That monitor gives them the ability to see a fight from a variety of angles, not just from the one they’re sitting at. And so there’s not a lot of excuses to say, ‘Well, I didn’t see that,’ when it comes to the UFC.

Look, we’ve been down this road before. We’ve offered advice on alternate scoring methods, we’ve heard what the pros have to say about it. And if the past few events — or the words of UFC VP of Regulatory Affairs Marc Ratner, who responded to the controversy by declaring that “some stuff” is being worked out internally — are any indication, then nothing short of a fixed fight is going to change the criteria upon which an MMA judge is decided, let alone be improved upon. Fighter-turned-judge Ricardo Almeida once suggested that each and every athletic commission member should be subjected to an educational “summit” each year in order to bring a more technical understanding of the sport to those supposedly fit to judge/reside over it, and that idea has caught on about as fast as that of a fighter’s union. And for the time being, it seems like things are going to stay that way.

But if there is one group of people involved in MMA that should not only be constantly evolving with the sport but actively seeking to evolve, it’s the referees, right? Because while a judge’s ignorance might equal a controversial victory for one fighter, a referee’s ignorance could drastically alter the course of a fight or worse *cough* looking at you, Jerry Poe *cough*. Take the Bobby Green/Jacob Volkmann fight from UFC 156, for instance, in which referee Kim Winslow chose to stand the two up in the second round despite the fact that Green was completely working Volkmann over with ground and pound at the time. Although Green was able to score the victory regardless, in short, Big John did not approve:

I will [only] stand a fight up when it’s close to an even position,” McCarthy said. “If you’re in guard, or even half guard, and the action has stalled to the point, and I give you warnings [that] I need you to get busy and nothing really changes, you’ve shown me that you can’t do anything, I’m going to stop you. I’m going to restart you. But if you get to dominant positions, be it side control, mount, back, the only way in the world that I would ever stand somebody up out of that, and I’ve done it once — I tell this story, it’s Jeremy Horn – is if you go and clamp down and you’re the one stalling the fight because you’re not doing anything.

You’ve got to have some compassion about how hard it is to do some of the things these [fighters] are trying to do, and doing it against a guy who knows what you’re trying to do. When you get guys in these mad scrambles and they’ll finally end up in a position on the ground, and you’ll see a referee come in and five second later [say], ‘Come one. Work.’ It’s like, ‘Jesus Christ, don’t you think they just did? Wouldn’t you be trying to get your heart rate back and breathe a little bit?’ You’ve got to be reasonable when you’re looking at things. Sometimes that’s what separates the referees that fighters want to have doing their fights compared to others, because they understand the complexities of what’s going on.

It remains to be seen if anything will actually be done to help curb two of the biggest problems currently facing MMA (well, two of the three biggest problems at least). The sad fact is, neither referees, nor judges, nor the athletic commissions responsible for hiring either of the former have truly been forced to take responsibility for a blown call, a late stoppage, or a botched score. Sure, us fans get in an uproar and take to our laptops every time we see one, but nothing is ever accomplished in terms of moving forward, primarily because none of the parties involved ever appear to be in danger of losing their job as a result of their own incompetence.

It’s a luxury many of us can’t afford at our jobs, unless your job is my job, in which case “gross incompetence” is more of a grey area. CAPTAIN SWINGDICK FOR LIFE, ASSHOLES!!!

* I know, I’m also disappointed that I couldn’t think of a fresh Alistair Overeem joke to go here. I’ll see myself out.

–J. Jones

So Can We Just Assume That Frankie Edgar vs. Jose Aldo Will Be Marred By Controversy, Then?

(Yep, that guy in the middle is going to be the referee. And that’s not even the scariest part.)

It is a pretty well known fact that Frankie Edgar has been at the center of some controversial decisions during his run as the UFC lightweight champion (and before it, and after it…). It is also a pretty well known fact that Steve Mazzagatti has been responsible for more botched calls in his refereeing career then Carly Rae Jepsen was in 2012. It is also also a well known fact that many of the current judges in MMA couldn’t tell a leg kick from a kneebar if their lives depended on it.

So with all that in mind, you’d think the Nevada State Athletic Commission would try their hardest (or try at all, really) to ensure that the upcoming featherweight title fight between Edgar and Jose Aldo at UFC 156 would be held under the supervision of the sport’s finest referees and judges, as to avoid any controversy that could possibly come as a result of their own incompetence. You would be wrong. As MMAJunkie reports:

During a meeting Tuesday in Las Vegas, the Nevada State Athletic Commission tapped veteran referee Steve Mazzagatti to officiate UFC 156’s main event.

Additionally, the commission named Adelaide Byrd, Jeff Collins and Junichiro Kamijo to judge the featherweight title fight, which pits champ Jose Aldo (21-1 MMA, 3-0 UFC) against ex-lightweight champ Frankie Edgar (14-3-1 MMA, 9-3-1 UFC).

My God, that was like reading over the list of dinner specials at a Tallahassee Denny’s establishment. At 4 a.m. Sure, the food looks decent enough when doctored up on the glossy menu, and besides, you’re already half in the bag. But then you happen to take a glance at the nutritional facts…and your heart suddenly sinks with the realization that there is no way your night doesn’t end with anything but rhythmic bouts of explosive diarrhea and shame.

(Yep, that guy in the middle is going to be the referee. And that’s not even the scariest part.)

During a meeting Tuesday in Las Vegas, the Nevada State Athletic Commission tapped veteran referee Steve Mazzagatti to officiate UFC 156′s main event.

Additionally, the commission named Adelaide Byrd, Jeff Collins and Junichiro Kamijo to judge the featherweight title fight, which pits champ Jose Aldo (21-1 MMA, 3-0 UFC) against ex-lightweight champ Frankie Edgar (14-3-1 MMA, 9-3-1 UFC).

Although we should breath a sigh of relief that Cecil Peoples’ name is nowhere to be found on the list of judges, it might interest you to know that Adelaide Byrd was the judge that recently scored all three rounds for Melvin Guillard in his one-sided loss to Jamie Varner at UFC 155. We’ll say that again, Adelaide Byrd scored all three rounds for Melvin Guillard at UFC 155. For those of you who didn’t catch that fight, we implore you to seek it out using whatever means possible, then ask yourself how someone who is paid to determine the winner of an MMA fight reached that conclusion. Oh yeah, and Byrd also scored the UFC 126 bout between Jake Ellenberger and Carlos Eduardo Rocha 30-27 for Rocha. So there’s that.

As for Collins and Kamijo? Well, you can take a look at their history of decisions here and here and draw your own conclusions. In our opinion, they should be able to balance out the inevitable suckitude that Byrd will bring to the table, although Collins’ 30-27 scoring of the Gleison Tibau/Khabib Nurmagomedov fight for Nurmagomedov should definitely raise some eyebrows.

On second thought, we should all just start preparing ourselves for Edgar vs. Aldo II. If Mazzagatti doesn’t misread a submission or rule an eye poke a TKO, the judges will surely score the fight a split decision for the wrong guy, or a draw. Maybe the rematch can be broadcast on the new Fox Sports 2 channel – preferably as their second UFC event — so we can all look forward to discussing UFC on Fox Sports 2 II: Edgar vs. Aldo II. Should be fun.

–J. Jones