Michael David Smith over at AOL Fanhouse posted an article on Sunday talking about the matchup between Chuck Liddell and Keith Jardine, and the controversial split decision that occurred in that fight. Two judges scored the bout 29-28 Jardine, while Marcos Rosales scored the bout 29-28 Liddell. His theory is that there may be too many judges in the sport that favor the bigger stars over the underdogs in those types of matchups.

Fans have seen their share of controversial decisions, and we tend to associate bad judging with a few names in the business. Namely, Cecil Peoples has earned the reputation as a bad judge due to the multiple 29-28 decisions he has made against 30-27 votes for the opposite fighters from other judges. I won't delve into his judging plunders as many fans are on the fence about many of them, but should we attribute decisions like the ones that Cecil Peoples has made in the past to favoritism?

I don't believe there are any judges in the sport of mixed martial arts that would ever favorably decide a fight because fighter A is much more popular than fighter B, or a star of the promotion. I don't believe there are “behind the scenes” dealings that plague our sport like other sports have had to deal with in the past. Favoritism in judging, for the most part, is non-existent in the major promotions in the world, and even the worst judging performances have people agreeing with the judge.

What causes scoring to be on different ends of the spectrum? Subjectiveness. There in lies the problem that has plagued this sport when it comes to deciding ultimately who won a fight. How much is a takedown really worth? Should a takedown count if the fighter does nothing with it? Do certain judges  score punches landed even when an opponent defends the strikes successfully? All of these questions deal with the subjectiveness of a judge, and it's what makes MMA a tough sport to judge.

We should be concentrating creating a breed of judges in this sport that uniformly have the knowledge to judge an MMA bout consistently across the board. If all judges used the same criteria, we wouldn't have as much subjectiveness in our scoring system. Of course, there are many who believe the 10 point system must go, which could also harbor some benefits. Either way, favoritism in judging is the easy way out in blaming someone for a call gone wrong. It's their subjective thinking that is really to blame, but can we really blame them? In their own minds, they have judged a perfect fight.

Until a criteria is uniformly consistent across all promotions and commissions, we'll still have these problems. Right now, there doesn't seem to be any type of hard push to train these veteran judges in the new ways, but there also isn't any set criteria to determine what a takedown is worth, activeness on the ground, etc. Hopefully, we'll see this change in the years to come.