Judge Douglas Crosby Responds to Criticism Regarding Controversial Scorecards

MMA judge Douglas Crosby has come under fire recently due to a pair of scorecards he submitted at Bellator 289 and UFC 282 on back-to-back nights.

In the bantamweight grand prix semifinal between Danny Sabatello and Raufeon Stots, Crosby submitted a 50-45 tally in favor of Sabatello, which was the lone dissenting scorecard in Stots’ split-decision victory. One night later, Crosby was one of three judges who rewarded Paddy Pimblett with a 29-28 verdict in the Englishman’s controversial unanimous decision win against Jared Gordon in the UFC 282 co-main event.

Crosby recently appeared on Chael Sonnen’s ”You're Welcome” podcast, and while he didn’t address specific scorecards, he offer some explanation at what he values when scoring a fight.

“Over the last 15 years, when you talk to the fighters, the overarching comment – and I’m not going to call it a complaint, I’ll call it a comment or a concern, is that effective grappling is not given enough weight in the scoring criteria and recently, the scoring criteria has been modified and updated so that effective striking and effective grappling are considered equal,” Crosby said. “And if effective grappling is considered the equal of effective striking, and then you look at any of my scores through that newly ground mental lens, the scores may become easier to understand.

“But that has to do with reading and understanding the criteria and I don’t know who does that and who doesn’t. I do know that when I talk to fighters they are overwhelmingly intelligent and articulate and courageous and I respect them all, for better or worse, and that’s what moves me forward, is what’s best for the fighters not what’s best for the coaches or the media. For the fighters and any fighter knows that they can discuss anything with me in private at any time.”

Crosby added that he has very little time between rounds to a sign a score to what he just witnessed, which only makes the task more difficult.

“You’ve got to assign a numerical value to what you just saw and on average you get about 15 seconds to turn that score in,” Crosby said. “If you write off about five of those seconds for the time it takes to write it, that leaves you about 10 seconds to make a decision about who won a round and who lost a round, in the most sophisticated, dynamic sport featuring the best athletes in the world. As a judge that’s what you are doing. I do everything I can to avail myself of whatever knowledge and insight I can get from the fighters, first and foremost, from the fighters.”

The other controversial issue regarding Crosby’s weekend was the fact that the veteran judge traveled across the country from Uncasville, Conn. for Bellator 289 on Dec. 9 to Las Vegas to work UFC 282 one night later. That ultimately led to the California State Athletic Commission adopting a rule that prohibits judges and referees from traveling across the country to work events on consecutive days. In this instance, Crosby believes people willing to work hard for the sake of the sport shouldn’t be punished for wanting to do so.

“Anyone who criticizes people for working, you can probably look into the data of people who criticize working class people and find some commonalities,” Crosby said. “One of the commonalities you will probably find is that the people making those critiques are not members of the working class. Anybody involved in MMA who would criticize or complain about that, about doing what working class people do, has probably not been in the lobby of the hotel in a second tier city after at event at 2:45 in the morning after the restaurant in closed and since it’s a second tier city, there are no other restaurants. They’re sitting in the lobby of that hotel eating a power bar or a Slim Jim or whatever they found in their knapsack to eat, knowing that they’ve got to catch a 5 a.m. shuttle to the airport. I know how that feels because I’m in that lobby, too.

“I travel on those shuttles and I sit in those coach seats for the fighters and for the sport. You’d have to ask yourself, before you accept that as valid criticism, I would qualify the source of that criticism and say is this a working class person making that critique or is it a fabulously wealthy person making that critique? You’d have to assign a value to the criticism based upon the person doing the criticizing.”