Originally posted on 05/19/2014:

good point, indeed...a good interim step to get "scorecards"closer to being a true reflection of what went on, and in line with your comment, would be to add one card, representing a score on the "fight as a whole"...a three-rounder would have four cards from each judge...R1, R2, R3...and FC (full contest) for fights going the distance...

eventually the FC score could be weighted more heavily...eg. count double...so a fighter who pitched a 3-round shutout could win, say 50-45 even tho' it were only a 3 rounder...then triple-weighted where the "fight taken as a whole' would account for 50% of the score (preferable to now, where it gets absolute zero weight)

ideally, if a supreme being judged a fight...there' be only that FC score "submitted"/revealed to Bruce Buffer, lol

as an educator, i've never liked marking an essay by paragraph, or by "points made"...always preferred to assign a score based on the quality of the whole effort (wrt. its effectiveness, efficiency, and perhaps even "elegance")...I find it makes me deliberate (aka. assess/evaluate="judge" in the full sense of the word) more carefully than the piecemeal approach

a related issue is that judges are FAR TOO hesitant to give out any scores OTHER THAN goddam 10-9...i'd like to see more 10-8s, 10-7s, hell even the odd 10-6 to reflect disproportionate levels of dominance that are currently unaccouned for with the fashion to 10-9 uniscore

AND, as i posted above in #3, i'd like to see more 10-10s as well, as it's bullshit to arbitrarily give a round to one guy cuz you don't want to appear "indecisive"...part of the reason why we have so many split and even unanimous robberies (eg. Davis "over" Machida)

if 95% of all rounds are 10-9 scores, net of penalty-deductions, of course (and i'd say this is a low estimate for the figure)...the judges are damn-well NOT judging...they're "scoring", yes but they are NOT "assessing"/"guaging"/"evaluating" ...they're just like teenagers giving thumbs up (ie. a "10-9") or down (ie. a "9-10") to a new song they're asked to "rate"...a seal could probably be trained to auto-dole out the 10-9s with their nose on a lever, based on the sounds and shadow movements emanating from the cage at least as reliably... as the idiots now lock-stepped into generally-mindless (almost arbitrary) "10-9ism"

it was refreshing at B120 that by simple "luck of the draw" we got some judges who made intelligent use of the 10-8, otherwise Brooks wouldn't have had a prayer of even getting a draw...the damn television announcer was locked into a "3 rounds to 2" drone, apparently thinking that anything other than 1-round differentials required senate approval...

with 10-9 uni-scores deciding each and every round of the the VAST majority of fights, it's exactly like declaring for a baseball game that "team A wins the game 2 innings to 1 with 6 drawn" (even tho' B scored 11 runs overall to team A's 5...but the single inning they won, say by a big margin like 7-1 is counted the same as each of A's two 1-run margin innings)...Brooks' R3 was clearly his "big inning" of the fight...it's great (and quite rare, actually...lucky for Brooks in that sense) that some judges were hip to that beat