The Bottom Line: When Nothingness Surpasses Evenness

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As Rose Namajunas and Carla Esparza engaged in a critically uncelebrated title bout at UFC 274 on Saturday in Phoenix, the announcers turned to a discussion about scoring. Joe Rogan in particular was exasperated about how to score the first two rounds. Neither fighter had landed more than four significant strikes in either five-minute stanza, leaving the judges with very little to evaluate. Rogan, along with Jon Anik and Daniel Cormier, sniffed out the possibility that Namajunas’ title could be in jeopardy long before her team did.

The non-existent offensive pace at the beginning of the fight did not end up creating any controversy. The third through fifth rounds, while a little bit more active, hardly produced fireworks in their own right. Thus, everyone except Namajunas and her corner seemed content to simply take the decision as a coinflip and pretend the whole thing never happened after Esparza was named the winner. Have a great wedding, and we’ll figure out the state of the division when you get back.

While it produced a relatively happy ending as far as really boring stories go, it’s not hard to imagine those early rounds leading to a problematic final outcome. Esparza won the first two rounds on two of the judges’ scorecards, meaning in all likelihood she only needed to win one more to take the fight. If Esparza won another lackluster third round on the cards before Namajunas turned up the offensive pressure and strongly won the final two rounds, Esparza still would have won absent what has become an increasingly rare 10-8 card. Namajunas might not generate a lot of sympathy given how the fight started, but the scoring system clearly would have produced the wrong winner.

When solutions for MMA’s problems are presented, the downsides inherent in such changes are very often overlooked. The perfect example is weight cutting. There are obviously serious issues with the current system where fighters drain themselves and sometimes see their bodies shut down in the process. It’s dangerous, and MMA fighters have died cutting weight. It’s also a situation where there aren’t any obvious answers because fighters are going to try to work the system no matter what that system ends up being.

If, for example, fighters had to weigh in the same day as their fights, they generally would cut less weight. However, they would then be fighting without the same amount of time to rehydrate, and studies have shown that this is particularly dangerous for the brain. The athletes who tried to push it by cutting more would be in the most jeopardy. One Championship’s system has been another effort to make things safer or the fighters, but it has been met with skepticism over lack of transparency. Recognizing a problem exists is one thing; finding a workable solution is another.

Luckily, in the case of rounds like the first two of Namajunas-Esparza 2, there is an easy, workable solution: 10-10 rounds.

The reason there aren’t more 10-10 rounds is a concern about a slippery slope that leads to judges not being willing to make a pick in close fights, which would in turn lead to more draws and controversy. MMA has many close rounds; 10-10 shouldn’t be an escape hatch when both fighters were effective in different ways over the course of a round. If there weren’t a workable way to use 10-10s for cases like Namajunas-Esparza without 10-10s spreading into other types of circumstances, more 10-10 rounds wouldn’t be nearly so desirable.

Luckily, it’s very easy to solve this problem by simply writing the solution into the judging criteria: a 10-10 round only applies when neither fighter has done enough under the judging criteria to earn the round. Thus, a close, competitive round would never be 10-10. There’s no worry about it being used as a cop out. A 10-10 should only apply in the case of a round defined by lack of action. In those rare rounds, it’s too arbitrary to just pick a winner for the sake of picking a winner. A 10-10 round in those instances would serve an additional purpose: It would be an admonition that precious little happened in the round. A 10-10 wouldn’t be principally about evenness but rather about nothingness. No one’s going to mistake the former for the latter.

Fights as uneventful as Esparza-Namajunas don’t happen that often, thankfully, but there’s no reason not to have a more accurate way of scoring them. Encouraging the use of 10-10s in those limited circumstances would make MMA scoring just a little bit better, with no real downside. MMA rule changes are slow to implement, but there’s no reason this one couldn’t be implemented painlessly.