The UFC has recently been plagued by a series of terrible, horrible calls. As Machida himself said after a recent robbery, "listen to the crowd." And we should.
The plain truth is that judges don't know what they're doing, and often the crowd does. They watched the fight too, right? So here's an idea: we use the knowledge of the crowd to act as a check on the power of the judges.
Here's how I think it could work: when the fight scores are announced and read out, the ref doesn't lift the hand of the announced winner right away. Rather he waits for a period of 10-30 seconds wherein the crowd either cheers or boos. If the boos are loud enough (measured perhaps with a decibel meter), the fighter who was announced as the loser gets an additional point applied to his score. So if it was announced 29-28 for Davis for example and everyone booed, we'd wait for the crowd to offer it's decision and then, when we see that they disliked the decision, use them as a "4th judge" and add 1 point to Machida's score. That would have made that fight a 29-29 draw.
At that point the new score would be tabulated and the ref would raise the winners hand (or nobody's if it was a draw). This is a very flexible idea that would seriously reduce the number of robberies and bad judging in the sport while also creating a feeling of interactivity and power for the crowd, which would lead to more viewers and perhaps save the UFC from its current slow decline.
Thoughts?
The plain truth is that judges don't know what they're doing, and often the crowd does. They watched the fight too, right? So here's an idea: we use the knowledge of the crowd to act as a check on the power of the judges.
Here's how I think it could work: when the fight scores are announced and read out, the ref doesn't lift the hand of the announced winner right away. Rather he waits for a period of 10-30 seconds wherein the crowd either cheers or boos. If the boos are loud enough (measured perhaps with a decibel meter), the fighter who was announced as the loser gets an additional point applied to his score. So if it was announced 29-28 for Davis for example and everyone booed, we'd wait for the crowd to offer it's decision and then, when we see that they disliked the decision, use them as a "4th judge" and add 1 point to Machida's score. That would have made that fight a 29-29 draw.
At that point the new score would be tabulated and the ref would raise the winners hand (or nobody's if it was a draw). This is a very flexible idea that would seriously reduce the number of robberies and bad judging in the sport while also creating a feeling of interactivity and power for the crowd, which would lead to more viewers and perhaps save the UFC from its current slow decline.
Thoughts?