The Mythical 10-8 Round

Sherdog hosts an online chat during Bellator shows that I occasionally check out to see how fans felt about the event. The internet is just a bad place to look for opinions about ANYTHING you are personally involved in. My broadcast partner Sean Wheelock was depressed for a week after the Huerta-Curran because he made the mistake of looking at online opinions of his call on that fight. A lot of people thought he made too big of a deal about the upset and had no problem saying so. Still, I'm a fairly resilient dude and so I periodically check out the chat to see what fans have to say.

During the last show I made a call that REALLY seemed to piss a lot of people off for some reason. During the first round of the Pitbull-Warren fight I stated that while it could have been a 10-8 round (Pitbull MASSACRED Warren for the full five minutes and almost finished him at the end of the round), judges rarely give them, so I was calling it 10-9 for Pitbull on my unofficial scorecard. A lot of people in the chat thought I was insane for that.

I sometimes think I should have two unofficial scorecards; one for what I think, and one for what I feel the judges will think. In this particular fight, the two cards would have been very different. I thought that the first round should have gone 10-8 to Pitbull for a complete wipeout. The problem is that judges almost NEVER give 10-8 rounds in MMA. In boxing the rule is pretty clear, if you get knocked down it's a 10-8. In MMA it simply isn't that clear-cut and knockdowns occur quite often for a variety of reasons. I have seen merciless ass-whippings that were scored 10-9. The only 10-8 rounds that I can remember recently were in the Alves-GSP fight and the Quarry-Starnes track-meet.

It turns out I was right, none of the judges gave Pitbull a 10-8 1st round. I also knew they wouldn't give him the 2nd round, although he won it on my scorecard.

There are two factors that consistently influence judges that were present in the Warren-Pitbull fight. The first was the crowd. Warren came out to chants of "U-S-A", while Pitbull got booed, it was pretty obvious from the beginning who the crowd was behind. Every time Warren did anything, the fans went nuts, its hard for the judges not to score for someone who's getting that kind of a reaction.

The 2nd factor is that judges, and fans for that matter, tend to put more emphasis on what happens at the end of a round. Boxers know this well and try to "steal rounds" whenever possible by putting on last-minute flurries in the closing seconds of the round (anyone remember Hagler-Leonard?). The disputed round in the Warren-Pitbull fight was the 2nd round and while I felt Pitbull won most of the round, Warren made his charge at the end and finally got his takedown going.

As soon as the fight ended I knew Warren was the winner. Only one judge scored it the way I did and even that surprised me. I'll see if I can talk the producers into a new system that takes into account the fact that I know judges are going to score the bout differently that I did. They probably wont go for it, but its worth a shot. It would certainly help explain some things to the fans in the chatrooms...