Comments Thread For: The Hidden Prejudices in Boxing Judging

[DeeMoney]

I still feel the single most important thing that will help with crap judging is simply holding them accountable after the fight. Make the judges available after the fight to sit in front of reporters and be held accountable for what they scored. I would be in favor of even making them available pre-fight to discuss how they will judge.

That would be nice, the problem is the scoring criteria is so ambiguous that any judge can squirm their way out of any accountability.

There is no demarcation for how effective the aggression must be for "effective aggression" to be scored in one fighters favor, so a judge can always claim a given fighters wasn't effective enough. Having defense be a scored criteria is basically double dipping, as practicing good defense essentially should prevent your opponent from landing clean punches or being effective with their aggression; however by listing it, judges can now reward a fighter who runs and just claim it was "good defense".
And then of course ring generaliship....if a fighter is being aggressive you can argue he is the general. But then the opponent you could argue is being the general for being a counter fighter. Some say its the fighter who 'fought his fight', so does that mean that a fighter can't change styles fight to fight? Does the fighter have to give his plan to the judges before the fight so they can judge who really 'fought their fight'?

Fix the criteria for judging and things would be better.

[TheOneAboveAll]

****** ass article. Completely missing the boat on bad scoring. Not willing to go out on a limb & call out terrible judging or judges.

The article completely misses the boat on bad scoring by completely glazing over the fact that the scoring system itself makes no sense at all. Aside from the ananitiy of the 10-pt Must System, boxing is the only sport with four competing and supposedly equally-weighted scoring criteria; a system which allows scorers to change their preferences for each round. Clean, hard punching should be the ONLY criteria if boxing is to make any sense at all. The other three criteria are all incidental to clean, hard punching. Corruption isn't the principal problem with boxing. It's the scoring system itself.

[ELPacman]

I've been saying this forever. Why not hold a judge with a ridiculous scorecard accountable and put him on the mic immediately to let the fans everywhere understand how he can up with his crazy scorecard. You will immediately know then and there how legit that judge is. Based on his dumb looking face answer. Not only will the face tell a tale, but his actual answer. If he cooks up the dumbest reason why he thinks fighter B won it 117 to 109 or some other crazy score, you simply never ever invite that HUMAN back to judge a boxing fight ever again. Not everyone are good at their jobs and folks unfortunately get fired for a reason. Why not treat judges the same way?

[CPNUTKnockoutFreshMart]

The article completely misses the boat on bad scoring by completely glazing over the fact that the scoring system itself makes no sense at all. Aside from the ananitiy of the 10-pt Must System, boxing is the only sport with four competing and supposedly equally-weighted scoring criteria; a system which allows scorers to change their preferences for each round. Clean, hard punching should be the ONLY criteria if boxing is to make any sense at all. The other three criteria are all incidental to clean, hard punching. Corruption isn't the principal problem with boxing. It's the scoring system itself.

The scoring criteria isn't equally weighted. Clean effective punching is by far above all other criteria. Just about never will a judge look at anything else. The only reason to look beyond clean effective punching would be if it were equal in that category which is basically impossible. I agree , the rest of the criteria should be removed from printed material because in reality they are not used except in support of clean effective punching. The other three criteria are supposed to enable you to land clean effective punches.

[CPNUTKnockoutFreshMart]

I still feel the single most important thing that will help with crap judging is simply holding them accountable after the fight. Make the judges available after the fight to sit in front of reporters and be held accountable for what they scored. I would be in favor of even making them available pre-fight to discuss how they will judge.

I don't think that they should be talking about how they are going to score before the fight because the only thing that should influence that at all is what happens in the ring round by round. I do strongly agree that they should be held accountable for their scoring. You should be able to verbalize why you scored a round like you did. I also believe that they should be available to the press not just the Commissions .

[CPNUTKnockoutFreshMart]

We should do some scoring here on the forum. Someone could make an Excel Spreadsheet where we could score pre assigned fights and then compare our scores, you would have 48 hours to do your scoring since people don't always catch the fights live.If a guy scores a round differently than everyone else then he could be called upon to defend the score. I would do it if I knew how but I'm not really a computer guy.

[Wacked_Out]

We should do some scoring here on the forum. Someone could make an Excel Spreadsheet where we could score pre assigned fights and then compare our scores, you would have 48 hours to do your scoring since people don't always catch the fights live.If a guy scores a round differently than everyone else then he could be called upon to defend the score. I would do it if I knew how but I'm not really a computer guy.

I used to give judges a score after each fight that I watched and kept a running total and averaged it out. But then I quit doing it. That's a lot of work. I had to list on my scorecard which obvious rounds werent even close then compare them to the official scorecard to see if any judges had it the opposite. Id add an exclamation point to that judges card for each round they got way wrong, then I added these up for a judges negative score. I only added up the bad ridiculous rounds scored. Ideally I'd give positive scores too but I didnt do that. But I did like my idea. I kept a running tally and I could see clearly which judges were the worst offenders based on multiple fights. It would be cool to have a website do all this to expose these bad judges and also the good ones.(like a boxrec for judges)

[landotter]

u might remember this comical short vid trying to interview glenn feldman over his awarding of an usky fight not to usyk but to joshua

I have never seen that. Sweet Stepfather Joseph... what a tap dance with no music!!

[CPNUTKnockoutFreshMart]

I used to give judges a score after each fight that I watched and kept a running total and averaged it out. But then I quit doing it. That's a lot of work. I had to list on my scorecard which obvious rounds werent even close then compare them to the official scorecard to see if any judges had it the opposite. Id add an exclamation point to that judges card for each round they got way wrong, then I added these up for a judges negative score. I only added up the bad ridiculous rounds scored. Ideally I'd give positive scores too but I didnt do that. But I did like my idea. I kept a running tally and I could see clearly which judges were the worst offenders based on multiple fights. It would be cool to have a website do all this to expose these bad judges and also the good ones.(like a boxrec for judges)

BoxRec will show you all three Judges scores for a fight , it also allows you to score the fight.

[Coverdale]

most judges know exactly who they want or have to get over the line especially in big fights and score accordingly, how often do u see close fights going to the 'b-side' lol, but it was a close fight, yeah but these close fights almost if not always go the same way, therefore they are not actually close at all just foregone conclusions

I don't understand this position, why not just score the fight 120 - 108 every time in that case? They have to hand in their scorecard at the end of each round, so are you suggesting they score the obvious ones to the "B-side" but then remember to score enough closer ones to the "A-side"?

You conspiracists are so confident with your outpourings on this subject you should be able to explain in greater detail what's going on here.