Rethinking our perception of the 10-point Must System

There is a lot of discussion concerning the 10-point must system as a result of the The Ultimate Fighter 9 Finale. For those who feel the system needs fixing I suggest reading Zach Krantz's piece.

A great deal of the debate centers around how the judges scored rounds and how that affected the overall scores for the entire fight.  WKR would like to offer a different perspective on how we view each round and how it pertains to the larger picture of each bout.

It is important to note that the judges are in fact scoring three distinct events and are not scoring the fight as a whole. Observers tend to think of the scoring system as a system that builds upon each previous event. While the final tabulation of points follows this "build" model the judges are not rendering their decision based upon the observations of successive events, but rather are judging each round separately from one another, as they are instructed to do. 

In other words imagine if in a basketball game the score and fouls reset to zero between each quarter, then at the end of the fourth quarter you added up all the scores to get the final result. We would view this as four quick, consecutive games in a row with the referees being instructed to officiate each quarter as separate events. This hypothetical dramatically changes the way we view a basketball game and how it would be officiated.

Essentially this is what happens in an MMA fight, with the judges rendering decisions on three five-minute fights that occur back-to-back. It is an extremely subtle and nuanced distinction but important because the judges are rendering their decision not on the whole body of work but rather three distinct events. Basically between each round the fight starts over with the scores being zero since judges are not suppose to take into account previous rounds when scoring later rounds. Thus a fighter can be beaten badly in one round and still win the fight based upon his performance in later rounds. 

There is another important distinction that needs to be mentioned. Judges are not weighing each round against one another. Take the Sanchez-Guida fight for example. Sanchez did his best work in the first round but unless he is rewarded a 10-8 round that round would be scored equal to the second round where Guida took Sanchez down and stayed in dominant position. While Sanchez clearly had a more successful round one, when compared to Guida's round two, they are worth equal amounts of 10-9. Basically the judging in the 10-point must system isn't accurately reflecting the quality of a round.

The fact that the judges are scoring three rounds as independent and distinct events that are always weighted equally is the real issue affecting scoring right now.