On second thought, open scoring is probably a terrible idea

In our ongoing quest to fix what we like to assume is a broken scoring system, I guess it only makes sense that eventually we’d seize on open scoring as a possible cure for what ails us.

This time it was the Georges St-Pierre vs. Johny Hendricks bout at UFC 167 that got us talking about it. If only we’d heard the judges’ scores announced after every round, people said, we’d have known exactly what the stakes were heading into that fifth and final round. This, presumably, would have made our lives better.

But no, those judges’ scorecards just had to stay hidden until the end of the Nov. 16 pay-per-view event. They just had to keep their scores a secret. And thus did our ignorance lead to outrage, all over again.

When you come at it from a purely theoretical standpoint, open scoring makes a lot of sense. Every other sport in the world tells you who’s winning before the match is over. Why not MMA? Why does it always have to be this tortured math problem where we add up effective strikes, subtract takedowns, multiply by “octagon control,” then divide by the square root of Cecil Peoples? Wouldn’t fighters rather know whether they’re winning or losing before their chance to do something about it is gone?

I thought so, but a quick, informal poll of some active MMA fighters yielded very few willing to voice a full and unwavering support for open scoring. Most sided with UFC flyweight contender Joseph Benavidez, who worried that it would alter the action too much if fighters knew exactly what the score was.

“I don’t like the way it can change the way someone fights,” Benavidez said. “I’ve seen it in boxing. Someone knows they’re up by five rounds and they can kind of hang back and not give it their all. Also, the guy that’s down, he has to change his style and maybe compromise a few things.”

UFC heavyweight Daniel Cormier agreed, saying that once a fighter knew for sure he was winning, he “would fight really cautious” down the stretch.

“With that being said,” Cormier added, “I always ask in between rounds whether or not I won the round, so I guess I do want to know.”

Still, just because a few fighters don’t like the idea is no reason to give up on it. After all, it’s not like you have to hear the scores out loud to know when one fighter is clearly up on the scorecards. We’ve seen plenty of final rounds between fighters who know they’re winning and those who know they’re losing, and sometimes that sense of certainty and/or desperation only makes things more exciting.

Think about all those times you’ve waited for the final round to start knowing that one fighter almost surely needs a knockout or a submission to win. Isn’t that still exciting? And if he gets the finish in that situation, isn’t it that much more dramatic?

But the real problems with open scoring were highlighted for me by Nevada State Athletic Commission Executive Director Keith Kizer, who said  the NSAC, along with the Association of Boxing Commissions, had considered instituting it recently. As Kizer explained, there are two major concerns that steered them away from the idea.

One is the effect open scoring could have on the judges. Imagine an important fight for a hometown fighter in front of a highly partisan crowd. We could be talking about Newark, N.J., or Rio de Janeiro, but picture what would happen if, after three rounds of a five-round title fight, the scores are announced and the judges have it unanimously for the visiting fighter.

“First of all, you could have people throwing beer bottles and all that,” Kizer said. “Secondly, even if they don’t throw beer bottles, the judges – and I’ve talked to some of them about this – they’d be afraid. They’d be looking behind them during the next round. Then the rest of the fight after that, there’s the potential for the judges to be distracted.”

There’s also the potential for the judges to be influenced by hearing one another’s scores, Kizer said. If you’re a judge who scored the first four rounds for one fighter while your colleagues have it more evenly split, “There’s going to be some pressure on you to feel like you should give the fifth round to the other guy.”

The other concern is how it might affect fighters, and our perceptions of them. Forget about them playing it safe in the final round. Many of them already do that when they know they’re ahead, Kizer said, “But so what? They take a knee in football. It’s part of sports.”

The big problem is that combat sports such as MMA, boxing and kicking are among the only individual sports in which you can get injured late in the competition, find yourself unable to continue, yet still win.

“You’re leading Wimbledon or winning the Masters and you trip and break your ankle, you forfeit,” Kizer said.

It’s not so simple in MMA.

Say, for example, a champion is battering the challenger for the first three rounds of a title fight. Then in the fourth he runs out of gas, fades in the face of an onslaught from his opponent, and barely survives the round. Heading into the final round, we hear the scores announced. It’s 39-37 for the champion. At the start of the fifth, there’s an accidental clash of heads or an inadvertent eye poke. The champ says his vision is blurry. He can’t continue. Even if the judges score that incomplete round for the challenger, the champ still wins a technical decision. Now what are fans supposed to think?

“Either he’s telling the truth, but, you know, you and I won’t believe him,” Kizer said. “Or he isn’t telling the truth, and he managed to keep the belt because he knew he was ahead on the scorecards.”

That potential for abuse, along with the potential for judges to be distracted, might make open scoring a situation where “the cure would be worse than the disease,” according to Kizer.

“If those two things weren’t concerns, I’d love it,” Kizer said. “I’m not one of these people who thinks there’s something special in not knowing until the end.”

It’s almost as if, instead of making sure the scores are public knowledge throughout the fight, we should be more concerned with ensuring that the judging criteria are clearly understood going into it. Maybe the problem isn’t that we don’t know what the judges are thinking, but that we don’t always know why they’re thinking it.

(Pictured: Georges St-Pierre and Johny Hendricks)