There is nothing wrong with the 10-point must system.

There have undoubtedly been thousands and thousands of articles and posts on the Internet regarding the 10-point must system and how it should be abolished from combat sports, MMA in particular.  Partly, because it has produced so many questionable decisions, perhaps mostly because it was developed with the sport of boxing in mind — most MMA fans like to distance themselves from the cousin sport.

However, introducing a more complicated scoring system for judges who can’t seem to utilize the 10-point must system properly would most definitely produce more variability and more chance for corruption.

Take the typical 3-round UFC fight for example, where there are no “obvious” 10-8 rounds, no even rounds and no point deductions.  Without caring about the round-by-round particulars, each card can be scored 4 different ways (30-27,27-30,29-28,28-29).  Looking at that and other popular proposed scenarios.

* Above results only consider the “typical” fight.

Some argue that variability is good, but I argue that 14 or more potential totals per card is too much.  I’m a firm believer that not only are some judges incompetent, but that some get lulled into giving charity rounds — which usually do not matter, but often times do matter when its a close fight and judges are influenced by the fans.  Alternately, I’ve seen some media members seemingly “give” fighters rounds because they doubted their scores in previous rounds and felt like they needed to even things up.

The “happy medium” seems to be either:

• Encourage the usage of 10-10 rounds.
• Include 10-9.5 as a common possibility in scoring rounds.

It is pretty clear, at least to me, that the current scoring model works when used appropriately.  Making a slight tweak would probably solve a majority of the scenarios where fights don’t seem to be scored quite right, while appeasing fans and limiting the amount of variability where judges can “play” with the numbers.