Why Three Judges See Three Different Fights
Judges sit cageside, at floor level, at fixed positions. That vantage point is worse for scoring than the one every viewer at home has. From the side of the cage a judge sees the action edge-on, with one fighter frequently blocking the view of the other's work, and with no replay, no second angle, and no slow motion available. Ground exchanges are the hardest case, because the significant detail is often what the bottom fighter's hands and hips are doing, and that is exactly what a low, side-on view obscures.
The cage structure itself adds interference, and so does the position of the officials relative to a clinch pressed against the fence. A judge on the far side may see a fighter working the body effectively while the judge on the near side sees only a stalemate. None of these judges is wrong about what they saw. They are scoring different samples of the same event, and the scoring system offers no mechanism for reconciling those samples before the cards are turned in.
