UFC 331 scorecards: three splits and the one worth arguing about

Three of the five decisions at UFC 331 were splits. That is an unusual night by itself, and two of them are defensible in about a paragraph each. The third is a fight where the man who landed more, attempted more, controlled longer and was scored the winner by two of three judges is not the same man the public thought won, and the reason is that the two rounds that decided it were separated by a single significant strike apiece.

Here is what all three cards actually say, from the judges, from the 332 fan scorecards submitted on mmadecisions, and from the 38 media scores we have.

Alonzo Menifield vs Iwo Baraniewski, 29-28, 29-28, 28-29

Chris Leben and Jovany Varela scored it for Alonzo Menifield. Ron McCarthy scored it for Iwo Baraniewski. Across the whole fight Baraniewski landed 67 significant strikes to 62 and controlled 4:19 to 2:54, and lost.

The round splits are the argument:

Round one was not close and every judge saw it the same way. Rounds two and three were decided by one landed strike each, in Menifield's favor both times, off a much lower accuracy rate, against more control time. There is no criterion in the unified rules that turns 34 of 81 into a clear round over 33 of 50, and there is none that turns it into a loss either. It is a coin flip that landed twice for the same man.

The public thought otherwise. Of 172 fan scorecards, 101 went to Baraniewski and 71 to Menifield, with 52.9 percent of all cards reading 29-28 Baraniewski. The fans gave Baraniewski round one at 97.1 percent, then split round two almost exactly in half, 50.6 to 49.4 for Menifield.

And the press thought otherwise again. All 13 media scorecards we have for this fight went to Menifield. That is the part worth sitting with: the room full of people paid to watch fights was unanimous for the man the crowd had losing, and the official verdict agreed with the room.

There is a way to read that which is not cynical. Fan scoring skews toward volume and toward whoever the viewer was rooting for, and it is submitted by people watching a broadcast with a commentary team talking over it. Media scoring is closer to the criteria and further from the crowd. When the two disagree this hard, the honest conclusion is not that somebody got robbed. It is that the fight did not produce enough separation for anybody to be confident, and the scoring system has no way to say so.

Ten-point must has exactly one tool for an even round, the 10-10, and nobody uses it. Fifty-one individual rounds were scored by judges at UFC 331. Not one of them came back 10-10.

Robelis Despaigne vs Tai Tuivasa, 29-28, 28-29, 28-29

Photo: NAPARAZZI / CC BY-SA 2.0

Felicia Oh and Sal D'Amato had Robelis Despaigne. Varela had Tai Tuivasa. This one looks worse than it is on the totals, where Tuivasa controlled 6:58 to 5:08 and landed 31 significant strikes to 30, and it looks entirely reasonable on the rounds.

Every judge gave round one to Despaigne, who landed 19 to 15. Every judge gave round two to Tuivasa, who landed 7 to 3 and controlled 2:22. Round three decided it: Tuivasa landed nine to eight and controlled 2:28 to 1:41, Despaigne landed a takedown, and two of the three judges gave the round to Despaigne anyway.

The fans agreed with them, which is the detail that should settle the argument. Of 102 fan cards, 67.6 percent scored round three for Despaigne, and the overall count went 55 to 45 in his favor. All 13 media scores went to Despaigne too. When judges, press and public independently reach the same verdict while the raw totals point the other way, the raw totals are the thing that is wrong, not the decision. Control time is not a scoring criterion. It is a proxy people reach for because it is the only number the broadcast puts on the screen.

Tuivasa has now lost eight in a row. It is fair to wonder whether that record made a close round easier to take away from him. It is not something any card in our database can prove, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Michael Aswell Jr. vs JooSang Yoo, 29-28, 29-28, 28-29

Daniel Mobley and Derek Cleary for Michael Aswell Jr., McCarthy for JooSang Yoo. Aswell out-landed Yoo 70 to 46, and the 58 fan cards split 38 to 19 his way with one draw. This is a split decision in name only.

About Ron McCarthy

He was the dissenting judge in both prelim splits, and in the main event he turned in the widest card of the three, 50-45 for Joshua Van where Derek Cleary had 48-47 and D'Amato 49-46. Three outlying cards in one night is the kind of thing that gets a judge's name trending.

Our database says that is a bad instinct. Across the 400 scorecards McCarthy has filed that we hold, 24 have gone against the fighter who was declared the winner, a rate of 6.0 percent. Sal D'Amato, the most experienced judge in the sport and the man who worked the same three fights, sits at 5.9 percent across 1,375 cards. Derek Cleary is at 6.6 percent across 808. McCarthy is not an outlier. He is the median, having an unusual night in public, on a card that produced three fights nobody could separate.

The judge profiles for all three are on the site, as is the Robbery Index, which ranks completed decisions by how hard the public record disagrees with the official verdict. Menifield and Baraniewski will land on it. Despaigne and Tuivasa will not, because the public agreed with that one.

The fix nobody wants to talk about

Every split on this card came from the same shortage: rounds where two men did roughly the same amount of roughly the same thing, scored by a system that is required to pick a winner anyway.

The unified rules have a 10-10 score. Commissions discourage it, judges avoid it because a card full of them looks like an abdication, and the result is that the closest rounds in the sport, the ones where the evidence genuinely does not separate two people, are resolved by whichever fighter the judge's eye happened to be drawn toward. Round two of Menifield against Baraniewski was 34 of 81 against 33 of 50. That is not a round somebody won. That is a round that happened.

Until using the 10-10 stops being treated as a professional embarrassment, the three splits on a card like this one will keep being decided by one strike, and the arguing will keep being pointed at the judges rather than at the thing that makes their job impossible.