What 34,509 judged rounds show: the 10-8 is vanishing again

Round one of Sean Brady against Joaquin Buckley at UFC 328 went like this. Brady landed 34 significant strikes. Buckley landed one. Brady held top position for 3 minutes 12 seconds of the five. Buckley controlled nothing, attempted eight strikes, and landed one of them.

All three judges scored it 10-9.

Two rounds later, Eric Colón and Sal D'Amato both scored a round in which Brady landed 25 significant strikes to Buckley's zero as a 10-8. The same two judges had given a 10-9 to the round with the wider striking gap. Dave Tirelli, sitting beside them, gave no 10-8 at all and turned in a 30-27 while his colleagues turned in 30-25.

I do not think any of those three cards is indefensible. That is sort of the problem.

A reform that worked, then quietly unwound

The revised judging criteria that took effect in 2017 were meant to fix exactly this. Judges had been treating 10-8 as a near-impossible score reserved for a round that ended in a stretcher, and the guidance told them plainly that a 10-8 was for a round of clear dominance, not near-finish.

It worked. I looked at 34,509 individual judge-rounds in our scorecard database, every round where we hold a named judge's score for both fighters, and the effect of the reform is immediate and obvious.

(2026 is a partial year, current through August 1.)

The rate jumped from 3.95 percent in 2016 to 6.11 percent in 2017, the year the new criteria landed, and peaked at 6.39 percent in 2019. Judges were doing what they had been asked to do.

Then look at the bottom of the table. In 2025 the 10-8 was awarded in 2.09 percent of scored rounds. That is not merely below the reform-era peak. It is below 2013, below 2014, below every single year in the sample except 2010, a year for which we hold only 381 scored rounds. The reform has been fully undone, and then some, without anybody announcing a change.

It is not a data artifact

The first thing I wanted to rule out is that we are simply seeing fewer scorecards from recent years, or scorecards from smaller cards.

We are not. 2024 is the single best-covered year in the entire database: 317 distinct fights with named judge scores, more than any other year, across 2,988 rounds and 101 different judges. 2025 has 279 fights and 2,676 rounds. The 2013 to 2016 baseline years sit at 215 to 224 fights each. If anything, our recent coverage is broader than our historical coverage, which would tend to pull the recent rate toward the mean, not away from it.

The rate is also a rate. It is 10-8s per scored round, so it is not moved by there being more finishes, more fights, or more five-round main events.

The decline is real.

Every one of the busiest judges moved the same way

The more interesting question is whether this is a few outliers or a change in the weather.

I took every judge with at least 300 scored rounds in the reform era, 2017 through 2020, and at least 250 in the current era, 2024 to now, and compared their own rates against themselves.

Four judges qualified. All four fell, and none of them fell a little. Michael Bell scored 10-8 rounds nearly nine percent of the time in the reform era and does so barely two percent of the time now. These are the most-used officials in the sport, the ones assigned to the biggest fights, and they have converged downward together.

When four independent people who are not supposed to talk to each other all change the same habit in the same direction over the same period, that is not four people drifting. That is a norm changing, somewhere upstream of the scorecard.

And when they do give one, they mostly disagree

Here is the finding that bothers me most, and it has not improved at all.

Take every round in the database scored by a full three-judge panel where at least one judge saw a 10-8. There are 769 of them. In how many did all three judges agree it was a 10-8?

1. That is 21.6 percent.

In 399 of those rounds, 51.9 percent, exactly one judge out of three saw a 10-8 while the other two saw a normal round. The most common outcome, by a wide margin, when a round is dominant enough for a 10-8 is that one person in the building thinks so and two people do not.

Restrict it to 2024 onward and the picture is identical: all three agree 20.7 percent of the time, one judge alone sees it 52.2 percent of the time. Whatever else has changed, the 10-8 remains a private opinion rather than a shared standard. Nine years after the criteria were rewritten to make it a defined thing, three trained officials watching the same five minutes agree on it one time in five.

The receipts are not close calls

None of this would matter much if the rounds in question were genuinely arguable. Some are. Others are these.

On October 12, 2024, Chidi Njokuani landed 52 significant strikes to Jared Gooden's 11 in the second round and controlled 3 minutes 15 seconds of it. Chris Lee, Michael Bell and Tony Weeks all scored 10-9. All three turned in 30-27.

Brady's first round against Buckley was 34 significant strikes to one, with no offense coming back and three minutes of control, and drew three 10-9s.

You can build a coherent argument for a 10-9 in either. A judge who reserves the 10-8 for rounds featuring a knockdown or a genuine finishing sequence will score both that way, and the criteria do give room for judgment. But that is a standard the 2017 revision specifically tried to move away from, and the numbers say the sport has moved right back to it while the written criteria stayed where they were.

What this actually costs

A 10-8 that does not get awarded is not an abstraction. It is the difference between 29-28 and 30-27, and more to the point it is the difference between a fighter who got dominated for one round and lost the other two winning the fight, and losing it.

Compress the scoring range and you compress the sport's ability to distinguish between a close round and a beating. Every round becomes worth the same amount, so a fighter who survives a mauling is rewarded at exactly the same rate as one who edged a competitive five minutes. The scorecard stops describing what happened.

We keep the full set of judged rounds, per-judge records and the fights where the crowd and the media most violently disagreed with the officials, on the judges board and the Robbery Index. If you want the rules themselves rather than the numbers, we wrote up how the 10-point must system is supposed to work a few days ago.

The criteria say a 10-8 round is one of clear dominance. In 2019 the officials of this sport found clear dominance in 6.39 percent of the rounds they watched. In 2025 they found it in 2.09 percent.

Fighters did not get three times less dominant. Somebody just stopped writing it down.

Every figure in this article is computed from UFCalendar's scorecard database, covering 34,509 judged rounds and 545 named officials.