3. Judging leaves something to be desired
The judging on Saturday night wasn’t great, and it raises some interesting questions about how an empty-arena environment will impacting how fights are viewed.
Multiple fighters have a solid case that they were wronged on the scorecards: Angela Hill against Claudia Gadelha in the co-main event, Edson Barboza against Dan Ige in the featured bout just prior, and Marlon Vera against Song Yadong.
None of the decisions were absolutely egregious. I scored all those fights 29-28, but each were in the favor of the person who came out of the octagon a loser.
Conventional wisdom would indicate that, in these unique times, the scoring should improve, not stay the same or arguably get worse. With no fans in attendance, the amount of distraction for the decision-makers drops. They get a cleaner experience of watching a fight, but do louder corners become more influential?
We don’t know the answer to this questions for certain. That’s because most judges are not allowed to offer public details of why they scored a fight the way they did. That leaves the fighters, managers, fans, and media left scratching their heads, and there were multiple instances of this over the three-event stretch.
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