Bruce Fedyck — USA TODAY Sports
UFC announcer Joe Rogan is full of it. In a recently published interview, Rogan said he believes MMA judges should have a “deep background” in martial arts and that you need to have been “hit in the face, strangled and arm barred” to do the job.
Rogan is wrong. Judges just need to be smart. Rogan doesn’t need to blast every MMA judge, or the people that hired the MMA judge, just because Lyoto Machida got robbed against Phil Davis. Machida should have taken some risks.
Every sport that has judges that determine a winner is going to have problems because those judges are humans, with subjective experiences and perspectives. Baseball has umpires. Gymnastics has judges. MMA and boxing have judges. Should we make every umpire a former baseball player?
Rogan should know better. Can you imagine a sports world where only the people who played the sport were allowed to judge it? We’re already seeing ex-athletes creeping into the broadcast booths of every major sport. Sometimes those ex-athletes know what they are talking about. Other times, they are there merely for personality reasons.
Who’s Rogan to judge the judges anyway? Yes, Rogan is ripped and is a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He’s still a comedian, however, and he does a great job. It’s not like we need to see him get wrecked in the UFC cage to believe he knows what he is talking about.
The imperfect judges are part of the sport, both for the good and the bad. The best way for fighters to avoid bad judging is to not leave the fight in the hands of the judges.
Joshua Molina is a MMA and pro wrestling writer for www.rantsports.com. Follow him on Twitter @JECMolina and add him to your network on Google.
