Three knockdowns, no 10-8: the UFC Sacramento scorecards

Gregory Rodrigues knocked Anthony Hernandez down three times on Saturday night in Sacramento. He landed 174 significant strikes to Hernandez's 90. He won on all three cards.

He won by one round on two of them.

Photo: Show Me The Money / CC BY 3.0

Derek Cleary had it 48-47. Ron McCarthy had it 48-47. Chris Leben had it 49-46. Nobody was wrong about the winner, and I want to be clear about that before I go any further: this is not a robbery, it is not going in the Robbery Index, and the 48 fans who scored it on the public cards we track went 46 to 2 for Rodrigues. The right man got his hand raised.

What did not happen is a single 10-8 round. Not in round two, where Rodrigues knocked Hernandez down twice and out-landed him 52 to 19. Not in round five, where he knocked him down again. Fifteen judge-rounds were scored in that fight and every one of them came back 10-9.

Round two was two knockdowns and 33 more strikes

Let me lay the round out, because the numbers are not close.

Round two: two knockdowns, plus 33 more significant strikes landed. Round four: 58 landed to 25, a 33-strike gap again, and Hernandez threw 50 significant strikes to absorb it. Both rounds were scored the same as round three, which was 12 landed to 12.

The unified rules tell judges to weigh impact, dominance and duration, and they say the 10-8 is not reserved for near-finishes. Judges do not score it that way, and that is not a Sacramento problem. Across every UFC fight in our scorecard data that reached a decision since January 2023, judges have turned in 8,112 individual round scores. Exactly 227 of them were 10-8s. That is 2.8 percent.

Narrow it to the rounds where somebody actually got dropped and it barely moves. In the same window, 507 judge-rounds contained at least one knockdown, and 42 of those came back 10-8. A fighter can put his opponent on the canvas and the round is still scored 10-9 more than nine times out of ten.

Rounds with two knockdowns in them are rare enough to count: twelve judge-rounds since 2023. One of the twelve was a 10-8.

The scoring did not decide this fight. Next time it will.

Cleary gave round five to Hernandez, the round in which Hernandez was knocked down. I am not going to pretend that is indefensible. Hernandez landed 24 of 31, he had a minute and 41 seconds of control, and he was pressing at the horn. A judge scoring the last two minutes rather than the first three gets there honestly.

But run it forward. Two rounds split the judges: McCarthy gave round one to Hernandez, Cleary gave round five to Hernandez, and each of them gave the other round to Rodrigues. One judge reading both of those rounds the way a colleague read one of them turns in a card of 48-47 Hernandez, in a fight with three knockdowns and an 84-strike gap in it. Two such judges and Hernandez wins. Nothing in that chain requires anybody to be crazy, which is the part that should bother you.

Hernandez, for what it is worth, went 3 for 29 on takedowns and still banked 10 minutes and 40 seconds of control time. That is the other half of the compression problem: control time reads as dominance on a scorecard whether or not anything is happening inside it, and knockdowns apparently do not.

The fix is not new and it is not mine. Score the 10-8 the way the criteria are written, and the numbers stop looking like this. Every judge in the sport can recite the impact-dominance-duration language. Our data says they have used the wide score on 2.8 percent of rounds for three and a half years, which suggests the criteria and the habit have very little to do with each other.

You can look up any of the three judges from Saturday on our judges pages. Leben, in the 27 scorecards of his we hold, deviates from his colleagues less than either of the veterans he sat with. He was the one who scored it 49-46. The rookie had it closest to the fight I watched.