BKFC 93 results: Perdomo's 14-second KO, judges settle the rest

Leonardo Perdomo needed fourteen seconds. Fourteen. Bear Hill touched gloves, ate a right hand, and the referee was already waving it off before either man had broken a sweat. BKFC 93 is going to get remembered for that, and it should, because a heavyweight main event ending before the ring walk music has finished echoing is the kind of thing you build a highlight reel around.

Here's the part that doesn't fit the highlight reel: everything Hollywood wasn't a knockout went the distance, and two of those fights needed a split or majority card to settle. BKFC handed out one all-time-fast finish and four full-length arguments on the same show, and I want to talk about the arguments, because that's where the promotion's judging actually got tested.

The fights that needed three judges

Photo: Bruno Massami / CC BY 3.0

Bryan Duran and Charles Bennett went the full five rounds at featherweight, and Duran got it on all three cards. Nobody's filing a complaint about that one specifically, but it set the tone for the back half of the card: BKFC's newer five-round scheduled bouts are starting to produce exactly the kind of grinding, swing-heavy fights that bare-knuckle judging was supposedly built to avoid. No gloves means fewer twelve-punch combinations and more single, fight-altering strikes. That's supposed to make cards easy to score. It didn't work out that way twice on this show.

Ernesto Suarez beat Ronny Hauser by split decision after five rounds at bantamweight, and that's before you even get to the bout where the disagreement actually got interesting. Tyler Randall took a majority decision over Chris Garcia at flyweight, also across five rounds, with one judge apparently watching a fight the other two didn't see. A majority card means one scorecard came back even. In a sport built entirely around damage and knockdowns, an even card after twenty-five minutes is its own small indictment of how hard these fights are to read live.

Add Nicholas Blume's three-round unanimous decision over Caleb Avila and that's four of eleven completed fights going to the judges on a card that also produced a fourteen-second knockout. BKFC keeps selling itself as the promotion where fights don't need judges. Half a card like this one is a reminder that the sport still needs them, and that the scoring criteria for five-round bare-knuckle bouts deserve the same scrutiny gloved boxing and MMA get, not a pass because there's blood on the canvas.

Everything else ended early

The rest of the card was almost aggressively fast. Esteban Rodriguez finished Stephen Townsel by TKO in 46 seconds. James Rodriguez knocked out Murat Kazgan at 1:31 of round one. Adyam Devillafuerte needed 1:54 to put away Miguel Hinojosa. Eduardo Suarez stopped Jose Davila in round two. Andrew Strode finished Gee Perez in the third round and Matt Russo finished Jancarlos Rivera in the fourth, a little later than the rest, but neither fight left it to a scorecard.

That's the whole story of BKFC 93 in one sentence: the fights that were supposed to be short were short, and the fights that were supposed to go the distance turned into the closest calls of the night. Bare-knuckle keeps promising to skip the part where three strangers with paddles decide who won. It still hasn't figured out how.

What's next

Perdomo just put together the kind of finish that gets a heavyweight a step up the card, not another Hollywood undercard slot. Whether BKFC actually moves him into a ranked matchup next, or parks him for another quick showcase, is the more interesting booking question than anything that happened in the co-main. Suarez and Randall, on the other hand, both won the kind of decision that invites an immediate rematch clause. If either promotion wants to prove the scoring was right, running it back is the easy way to do it.

Nobody asked me, but I'd book the rematch before I booked anything else off this card.