With all of the conjecture this week about bad MMA judging and all of the conversations being had on several podcasts, Big John McCarthy says that the MMA judges really do care.
It is very easy to just the judges don’t care; Hell, I say it every time there is a bad scorecard. Most MMA fans will say the judges don’t care about what they are watching, so therefore the scorecards reflect that. Well, ‘Big John’ says that, in fact, the MMA judges care a lot.
On a recent episode of his podcast, Weighing In, McCarthy explained.
“Everyone thinks that the judges don’t care. All right, I’m telling you right now, they fu*king care. They care more than you realize, they do more work than you realize,” McCarthy said. “They talk about each of these rounds, not each of these fights- each of these rounds, over and over again. They get on these group texts, and they say, ‘I want you to watch this moment.’ And they’ll go on Zoom [calls] together and they do all of this work.”
“So, to sit there and say that they don’t understand the sport. No, you don’t understand who they are. A ton of these people are people with black belts in Brazilian Ju-Jitsu and have been a part of doing things for a long time. Like, at the beginning of MMA, we had a lot of judges that did not belong. All right, I’m just gonna say straight out. There were people that came from a martial arts background that had nothing to do with anything that was being used in MMA. There were boxing officials that had no idea about anything on the ground. Those people are not still there. I can come up with names that people are going to say, and they’ll say they’re still there. They’ve done a lot to try to stay there. And that’s all part of their athletic commission deciding that they’re going to keep that person in that position.”
McCarthy would go on to say that everything really comes down to the athletic commission. They put the judges in place and decide who gets to judge.
It is refreshing to hear someone that really knows a lot about the judges say that they care.
