Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Decisions, Decisions – Part II: Split Decisions and the Men Who Love Them



The first part of this investigation into the judging criteria used by Pride and the UFC examined the methods used by each organization and laid out the inherent flaws in each system. To sum up quickly, Pride’s system, while much simpler, provides little concrete direction to its judges and leaves too much to their subjective opinion. The UFC’s criteria requires judges to keep track of a huge amount of information, watch for dozens of techniques, and arrive at a difficult-to-comprehend score for each round using the “ten point must” system.

The end of the article presented a hypothesis: If a judging system was perfect, then nearly all decisions would be unanimous, no matter who the judges were or how many of them judged the fight. If that is true, then looking at the number of split decisions each system produces could indicate which system of judgment is better.

(Read More)

No comments: