Look up California State Athletic Commission Executive
Director
Andy Foster on Sherdog's Fight Finder, and you'll see a
man who knows his business when it comes to MMA.
Look past the suit and tie in his profile photo, past the
expression that seems more befitting of a man trying to get your vote for city
council than a man who could choke you out, and you'll see that Foster,
36, was 9-2 as a professional fighter. His only two losses came against
respected MMA veterans Brian Ebersole and Amar Suloev, the
latter of whom scored a knockout victory over Foster in Foster's
last fight as a pro in 2007.
So when Foster took over as head of the California
commission in 2012, he knew all too well that among the many persistent gripes
fans and fighters had with the state of the sport, concerns about judging were
near the top of the list.
Why weren't problem judges removed, people asked. Why weren't
commissions doing more to evaluate their own judges? Why wasn't there any
accountability, or effort to improve on a flawed system that was so often
responsible for determining whole career arcs, not to mention the size of the
paychecks fighters took home?
Foster had wondered the same thing, which is why, after
taking the job in California after four years with the Georgia Athletic and
Entertainment Commission, he paid special attention to a presentation from
former amateur boxer and boxing judge Matt Podgorski at a recent meeting of the
Association
of Boxing Commissions.
"I wanted something where I could gauge where my
judges were at," Foster told MMAjunkie.
"You know, am I putting the right people in there? Just because you've
been doing it a long time, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're right."
Podgorski, who now works full-time as a statistical
analyst for a Chicago-area food company, suggested a system to collect all the
scoring data from all the fights, and then compare the judges against one
another while also examining the numbers to expose certain scoring patterns and
biases. He called it
"The Pod Index," (Click Here to see this System)
and all he needed was a commission willing to put it into place. |
Another
SHOCKING Decision In Nevada MMA
|
YouTube
Clip of How The Pod Index Was Defined for Boxing
|
To Foster, it sounded like exactly the kind of thing
he'd been looking for.
"I wanted something to back me up other than just my
thoughts," Foster said. "I wanted some math or
statistical thought process to back up what I'm doing with these assignments."
What
The Pod Index promised was a system that logs every
judge's score for every fight in the state of California. With a large enough
sample size, Podgorski said, it would provide a statistical picture of
which judges were consistently at odds with their peers, especially in split
decisions.
"That doesn't necessarily mean the judge is wrong,"
Podgorski said. "It just means we need to investigate further.
If we see a judge is the odd man out 20 percent of the time, we can go back and
look at five or six fights in which they were in the minority and see what a
greater number of different judges say."
To complete that process,
The Pod Index engages the services of five more "anonymous"
judges who watch the same fight with the commentary turned off, then turn in
their own scorecards for comparison. Getting a larger pool of judges lends
clarity to the overall picture, since, as Foster put it, a judge who
ends up in the minority of a split decision "could just be with two
dummies." |
"But even if you're with two dopes, the data will
start to tell us who are the most consistent judges," Foster
said. "You could be right several times with the other two judges being
wrong, but it's probably not going to happen that way over and over again."
Podgorski stressed that his sample size is still
relatively small since he's only been working with the California commission
since July, and in a more limited capacity with the
Nevada State Athletic Commission since November,
but already that broader analysis has yielded some surprises.
For instance, those judges who wind up in the minority on split
decisions? Once the field of judges is expanded to include the five additional
anonymous judges, those lone outliers are vindicated more often than you might
expect.
"As much as a third of the time, when there's a close
split decision, the judge in the minority might have three or more of the five
anonymous judges agreeing with him," Podgorski said. "It
just goes to show that some of those split decisions really are tough calls."
Podgorski knows all about that from his own experiences
as a boxing judge. For more than 15 years, he scored bouts at ringside, he said,
quitting only when he began
The Pod Index as a side project, in order to
eliminate any potential conflicts of interest. He still recalls a championship
bout he scored, one that resulted in what he describes as "a wild split
draw."
"And I mean really wild," Podgorski
said. "I had it nine rounds to three for one guy, and another judge had
it 10 rounds to two for the other guy. The third judge had it even. I was like,
'What the hell?'"
Recently Podgorski tracked down video of the fight,
just to see if his own system would offer any insight. He brought it to a World
Boxing Council conference in Las Vegas and asked nine other judges to score it.
"And it was the same thing," Podgorski
said. "The scores were all over the place. That really opened my eyes.
Sometimes you just get into your mindset. You can't possibly see how anyone
could see it another way, and then they do."
But that raises the question of just how much a system like
this can really change when it comes to the difficult task of scoring a fight.
With a large enough sample size, it can identify consistent outliers among
judges, maybe even those who need further training (or fewer assignments).
But can it actually make judging better? |
|
Maybe, if it's implemented correctly. In fact, Podgorski
said, his initial motivation in creating it was to use it more as a teaching
tool than as a means of judge evaluation.
"The program is not designed to call judges out or
embarrass them," Podgorski said. "It's not meant to
say, 'You're the best judge, and you're the worst judge.' It's not a ranking
system. It's a diagnostic tool for the judges to get better, and that's where
the recommendations come in."
The recommendations, in some cases, are surprisingly specific
and thorough. In a recent scoring review of a high-profile boxing match in
California, Podgorski's report identified one judge as having "a
strong work-rate preference" in his scoring, which seemed to be
altering his perception of close rounds. It recommended a specific bout for him
to watch and score, in order to help the commission determine whether he's too
rigidly set in his ways, and whether that "strong preference can either
be accepted or used as a catalyst to provide him some additional coaching."
That additional coaching, according to Foster, is the
whole point.
"There are some judges who like doing this, and it's a
fun thing for them, and there are other judges who really take this stuff
seriously," Foster said. "They sit at home and watch
fights and take notes and do trainings. They focus on it. And these fighters who
spend all this time in the gym, spend six or eight weeks in a training camp,
they diet and live by this strict discipline just to spend 15 or 25 minutes in a
cage. I want the same level of dedication from my refs and judges."
According to Podgorski, the data is helpful not so much
in determining who's right and who's wrong on any given decision, but more in
identifying trends. That's especially important in MMA scoring, which both Foster
and Podgorski said has too often followed a boxing model, making it
reluctant to use the full range of possibilities within the 10-point must
system.
"The perfect example in MMA is, you can squeak out the
first two rounds, just barely win them, 10-9 on all the cards," Podgorski
said. "Now you've essentially sealed the victory as long as you don't
get submitted or knocked out. It's a problem especially in MMA because there's
no knockdowns. In boxing it's easier. There's a knockdown? It's 10-8. It's
clear. Everyone agrees. In MMA you can pummel a guy and still get a 10-9 on half
the judges' cards. That's something that definitely needs to be addressed."
With this data to draw on, Podgorski said, commissions
can go to certain judges and point out their recurring tendencies.
"We can do analytics to see how often judges are using
10-8 rounds, how often they're split, to where one judge has it 10-9 and another
has it 10-8, and that really gives us some firepower to say, 'Hey, you scored
100 rounds in the last year, but you didn't have one 10-8 round, whereas the
average judge has five percent,' or something like that," Podgorski said. "It
helps us encourage judges to think about it more broadly and not be so dead set
on boxing-style scoring."
Reactions from the judges have been mixed, Foster said.
At first, few were terribly enthusiastic about a system that could potentially
challenge their status and hold them up for more public criticism. But since the
system was developed by a former boxing judge and first implemented in a
commission run by a former MMA fighter, both men say that judges have gradually
come around on the idea, for the most part.
"I know a lot of the judges personally, especially on
the boxing side but also somewhat on the MMA side, so it makes it a lot easier
coming from me," Podgorski said. "It's not some intern
crunching numbers. It's somebody who's been there, who gets it, and can
understand what the data means and what it doesn't mean."
Longtime MMA referee Herb Dean, who has also worked as
a judge and helped train others in that capacity, said he's encouraged to see
some effort being made toward evaluating existing judges, but he doesn't see the
problem being fixed by statistical analysis alone.
"I think it's useful to know, especially on a 10-8
round, who's on the outside, but crunching the numbers can't be the end,"
Dean said. "We still have a mixed pool of judges who have a lot
of different backgrounds. Some have more experience in this than others, some
have actually been competitive in some of the sports that make up mixed martial
arts, and some of them haven't. Until it's mandatory that everyone has a
detailed understanding of the position, we're going to have problems. But I do
think it's a good thing, a good start."
At this point, Foster said, it's still too soon to make
any broad generalizations based on the data. The program has been in effect for
less than a year, though the
CSAC
has worked to retroactively load the last few years worth of judging data in the
state into
The Pod Index's database. In order to even begin to
draw conclusions, Foster said, they need at least 60 rounds of scoring
from every judge. Even then the data doesn't tell them everything, but it does
give them a place to start.
"When you've got five years worth of data that you can
look at objectively, you can see someone who's got 400 rounds worth of boxing
scored and he's only with the majority 71 percent of the time,"
Foster said. "Then you've got someone else with the same number
of rounds who's with the majority 92 percent of the time. You know, I'm not
saying that's the only thing you should make a decision on, but it's something
to think about. It's a tool. I think we have to be doing something to try and
improve judging."
"And I think it is improving," Foster
added. "It's a lot better than where it was, even if we're not yet
where we need to be." |