CSAC pulls back the curtain on regulation

Mixed martial arts was saved by regulation. Without regulation it was banned in the USA, and then regulation brought it back. Prizefighting at the highest levels was heavily controlled by organized crime elements in the 50s and early 60s. Regulation gradually drove the mob from boxing. In unregulated Japan, mixed martial arts at the highest levels was heavily controlled by organized crime elements, and when that open secret became fully open, Pride collapsed. JMMA has never recovered.

However, regulation is so little recognized that the average fan blames the UFC for poor judging, when in fact judges, referees and other officials right down to the guy who clangs the bell are licensed and chosen by the state, tribal, or provincial government athletic commission.

In the interests of transparency, forward thinking executive director of the California State Athletic Commission Andy Foster recently invited a select group of MMA writers to participate in a media day.

The media took a judging seminar with John McCarthy, shadowed judges and submitted scores at Bellator 136, and learned about Foster’s ambitious efforts to fight PEDs.

PED testing is expensive, but Foster is looking to take advantage of economies of scale. David St. Martin has the story for MMAFighting.

Much like a large Division I NCAA football program’s revenues subsidizing a school’s smaller sports, the larger MMA events likewise cover the costs of regulation.

Earning a percentage of the gate receipts, Foster estimates the CSAC took in about $139,000 at UFC 184 in Los Angeles. For the first time in history, the CSAC administered post-fight blood and urine tests to an entire card. All the athletes tested clean. To enable that testing, Foster estimates the commission spent $25,000.

The margins shrink considerably outside of UFC events. Foster estimates that the CSAC would take in about $11,000, but spent about $6,000 to $7,000 of it regulating Bellator 136 in Irvine.

Only two bouts at Bellator 136 were subject to additional out of competition drug testing. While the promotion paid for the main event between lightweight champion Will Brooks and challenger Dave Jansen, the CSAC picked up the tab to test fellow lightweights Marcin Held and Alexander Sarnavskiy.

According to Foster, Held and Sarnavskiy were tested Wednesday and due to an expedited request he got the results back by Friday afternoon before the fight. Both fighters were clean.

Bellator used Request A Test, a private organization “partnering with nationally recognized and certified laboratories, such as LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics,” to test Brooks and Jansen. Those results were also clean.

Foster hopes to contract Request A Test to broaden the CSAC’s reach in testing its athletes, especially as the sport continues to expand internationally. Rather than test competitors on fight week when most savvy users have cycled off a PED regimen, Foster hopes the service will allow him to test athletes much further out and internationally.

While blood and urine testing an entire UFC card in and of itself is ambitious, Foster has his sights set even higher. Foster was happy to report that he was in preliminary discussions on how best to replicate that same level of comprehensive testing as far as 28 days before an event. Foster said he would soon test an entire card out of competition.

While use of PEDs is widely publicized, and is obviously being addressed forcefully by Foster, he is also working on the less heralded by deadly issue of weight cutting.

Aside from the screenings, Foster also hopes the CSAC will spearhead a movement to help combat excessive weight cutting in MMA. In February, Foster called weight cutting the ‘most dangerous thing in combat sports right now.’

“It’s all connected,” said Foster. “Dehydration is connected to traumatic brain injury. Traumatic brain injury is connected to getting hit in the head. Getting hit in the head is part of our sport. We’re trying to mitigate the risk. I’m not here to tell people not to do it, I’m here to figure out the best way to do it and do it safely.”

If circumstances were a bit more ideal, Foster said he would even hope to have MMA weigh-ins more closely resemble the NCAA’s Weight Management Program for Division I wrestlers.

Marc Raimondi also writing for MMAFighting.com also took part on the CSAC media day, and focused not on the PED testing, but on judging.

It might look easy sitting at home watching on Spike TV or FOX Sports 1 or pay-per-view. It’s not. It’s easier to screw up than you think. Believe me, I did it.

 John McCarthy, the godfather of MMA refereeing and one of the men who helped write the unified rules of the sport, explained the process differently than most fans have been led to believe. Effective striking and effective grappling are the two most important things in every round, McCarthy said. Only if those two things are equal do you take into account details like cage control and aggression.

In other words, the fighter who does the most damage or attempts to finish the fight with submission attempts should win the round — not the fighter who spends the most time in top position or pushing his opponent against the fence.

“It’s not who lands the most strikes,” McCarthy told us. “Where do they land and what effect do they have on the fight?”

Sounds like a simple and easy theory to apply, right? Not so much. On a TV screen, McCarthy showed us the third round of the fight between Gilbert Melendez and Diego Sanchez from UFC 166 in October 2013 without commentary or crowd noise. Melendez lands more and seems to do more damage, but Sanchez has a major flurry in the middle of the round when he drops Melendez with a big uppercut and takes Melendez’s back.

Of the five journalists in attendance during the McCarthy judging crash course, three scored the round for Melendez and two scored it for Sanchez. I was one of the latter and McCarthy explained to me why I was wrong. Sanchez had the best strike of the round, but Melendez never lost any of his faculties — he braced his fall on the knockdown — and Sanchez never came close to finishing on the ground.

Melendez landed more and opened up a nasty cut over Sanchez’s eye. He should have won that round. But two judges, presumably interpreting it like I did, scored the round for Sanchez at UFC 166. Melendez won the fight, winning the first two rounds, but he should have won them all.

Bellator 136 could not have been a better event for this exercise. There were an incredible amount of close rounds and even what should have been a 10-8 — Joey Beltran’s near finish of Brian Rogers in the second round of their fight.

None of the journalists present could pull the trigger on the 10-8, and we should have. As McCarthy explained it, a 10-8 must have a combination of dominance (a lack of offense from the fighter on the losing end) and damage. There are cases when there is so much damage — like with Beltran on Rogers — or dominance that a 10-8 is warranted even when the other one is not present.

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“I hold them accountable,” Foster said of his referees and judges. “This is not just going out and having fun on a Friday night. This is people’s careers.”

McCarthy said somewhere between 3 to 5 percent of fights are scored incorrectly with the wrong fighter winning. He’d prefer it to be less than 1 percent.

Foster’s idea of pulling back the regulatory curtain for the media is an excellent one, and will hopefully be emulated by ACs all across North America, and the world.