Almost every argument about a controversial MMA decision assumes that the judges either watched a different fight or were not paying attention. Sometimes that is true. More often the three officials watched the same fight, applied the same written criteria, and still arrived at different totals, because the scoring system asks them to compress a chaotic three-dimensional contest into a single number per round and gives them limited guidance on how to weigh the things that number is supposed to represent.
Understanding where judging actually breaks down requires separating the mechanics, which are straightforward and consistent, from the interpretation, which is neither. The mechanics are inherited from boxing. The interpretation is where MMA's particular problems live.
