Sports

MMA Scoring System Flaws Grappling: Rogan Breaks It Down

Joris van Leeuwen — Sports journalist covering competition, athlete stories, and the business of professional sports5 min readApr 11

Key Takeaways

•The 10-point must system was designed for boxing and doesn't translate well to MMA — dominant grappling rounds routinely score the same as competitive striking exchanges.
•Aljamain Sterling's back control and submission grappling are cited as a clear example of elite positional dominance that judges consistently fail to score accurately.
•The hosts advocate for more liberal use of 10-8 and 10-7 rounds, or an entirely different scoring framework built specifically for mixed martial arts.

The Borrowed System That Was Never Built for This Sport

The 10-point must system has one job: tell you who won the round. In boxing, that's manageable. Two fighters, one surface, punches. The problem is MMA is not boxing. It never was. When the UFC adopted the same scoring framework, it imported a tool designed for a completely different sport and hoped nobody would notice the gaps. They noticed. On JRE MMA Show #177 - Protect Ya Neck, Rogan and his guest make the case that those gaps have been quietly distorting results for years — and the fighters paying the price are almost always the grapplers. The system wasn't broken by MMA. It just was never designed to handle it in the first place.

What Judges Actually See When a Wrestler Dominates

Here's the core issue. A striker lands a clean combination, the crowd reacts, the judge marks it down. A wrestler takes someone's back, sinks in a body triangle, and spends three minutes threatening a rear-naked choke — the crowd goes quiet, and the judge isn't always sure what to do with it. The discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience points directly at this perceptual gap. Striking is legible. Grappling dominance requires a judge to understand positional hierarchy, submission proximity, and the cumulative exhaustion being imposed on the bottom fighter. Many judges, according to Rogan and his guest, simply don't have that literacy. That's not a small problem. That's the whole problem.

Sterling as the Case Study Nobody Wants to Acknowledge

Aljamain Sterling gets brought up specifically because his grappling — particularly his back control — represents exactly the kind of dominance the scoring system struggles to process. When Sterling has someone's back, he's not just holding a position. He's draining energy, limiting offense, and sitting one grip adjustment away from ending the fight. The hosts argue that rounds where Sterling achieves and maintains that level of control should not be scoring the same as a competitive round where both fighters are trading on the feet. As we've seen in discussions around elite wrestling in the UFC, the gap between what grapplers actually accomplish and what they get credit for on the scorecards is a recurring frustration at the highest levels of the sport. Sterling is just the clearest current example of a fighter whose style exposes the flaw every single time he competes.

The 10-8 Round Nobody Gives Out

The 10-8 round exists. It's in the rules. It's supposed to be used when one fighter significantly dominates another in a round — not just wins it, but controls it so thoroughly that a single point difference feels inadequate. In practice, judges treat the 10-8 like a nuclear option, something reserved for near-finishes or extended knockdowns. Rogan and his guest argue that this reluctance is itself a scoring failure. A round where a fighter spends four and a half minutes on their back, unable to improve position, unable to threaten offense, and absorbing ground-and-pound should be a 10-8. The math of a close fight changes completely when judges are willing to use the full range of scores available to them. Right now, they're not. And fighters who build their game around sustained positional dominance are losing decisions they should be winning because of it.

What a Better System Might Look Like

The conversation doesn't land on a single clean solution, which is honest — because there isn't one. The hosts float a few directions: more aggressive use of 10-8 and 10-7 rounds, a multi-criteria scoring system that separates striking, grappling, and aggression into distinct scored categories, or a round-based system with half-points. None of these are simple to implement, and all of them introduce new problems. But the underlying argument is hard to dismiss. A sport this technically complex, with this many ways to dominate an opponent, deserves a scoring system that was actually designed for it — not one that was borrowed from a different sport and never properly retrofitted. The Ultimate Fighter era, which helped launch careers like Diego Sanchez's and cemented BJ Penn's legacy at lightweight, built a fanbase that now watches elite grapplers get robbed on scorecards. That fanbase deserves better judging infrastructure than what currently exists.

Our Analysis— Joris van Leeuwen, Sports journalist covering competition, athlete stories, and the business of professional sports

Our Analysis: The frustrating part of this conversation is that everyone in MMA already knows the scoring system is broken — fighters, coaches, fans, commentators. The Joe Rogan Experience isn't breaking new ground here. What it does is put a name and a face on the problem in Sterling, which is more useful than abstract complaints about judging criteria. Sterling's back control is the kind of dominance that ends careers in training rooms but somehow becomes ambiguous in a sanctioned bout with three judges watching.

The real obstacle to reform isn't identifying the problem — it's that athletic commissions move slowly, judges aren't trained to the standard the sport now demands, and there's no unified governing body with the authority to overhaul the system globally. The UFC can advocate for change. It cannot mandate it. That structural gap is why this same conversation will be happening in another five years.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is grappling scored in MMA?

Under the current 10-point must system, grappling is supposed to be evaluated on effective grappling — takedowns, positional control, and submission attempts — but in practice, judges consistently weight striking more heavily because it's visually legible in real time. The result is that a fighter like Aljamain Sterling can spend four minutes threatening a rear-naked choke from back control and still lose the round on the cards. The scoring criteria technically account for grappling dominance; the problem is judge literacy and application, not the written rules alone. (Note: how much of this is systemic bias versus individual judge quality is debated within MMA judging reform circles.)

Why do grapplers with clear positional dominance often lose rounds to strikers in MMA?

The core issue is perceptual — striking produces immediate, crowd-readable feedback that judges can track in real time, while grappling dominance requires understanding positional hierarchy, submission proximity, and cumulative damage that isn't always visible. Rogan and his guest make a compelling case that this isn't just a preference gap; it's a literacy gap, and it systematically disadvantages fighters whose entire game is built around control. The 10-8 round exists precisely for situations where one fighter is thoroughly dominated, but judges treat it as a last resort rather than a standard tool — which compounds the problem for grapplers across full fights.

What specific reforms have been proposed to fix MMA scoring for wrestling and grappling?

The most discussed options include more aggressive use of 10-8 and 10-7 rounds for sustained positional dominance, a multi-criteria system that scores striking, grappling, and aggression as separate categories, and half-point round scoring to better reflect close but not equal rounds. None of these are clean fixes — each introduces its own implementation problems — but the argument that a sport this technically complex deserves a purpose-built scoring system, rather than a borrowed boxing framework, is hard to dismiss. No major sanctioning body has formally adopted any of these reforms as of this writing.

Is Jon Jones a striker or a grappler?

Jones is genuinely both, which is part of what made him so difficult to score against — he uses wrestling and clinch control to neutralize opponents while mixing in unorthodox striking. He's actually a useful counterpoint to the Sterling discussion: because Jones blends both skill sets, judges had more familiar visual cues to work with, whereas Sterling's game is more purely grappling-dominant and therefore more exposed to the scoring gap this episode addresses.

Based on viewer questions and search trends. These answers reflect our editorial analysis. We may be wrong.

✓ Editorially reviewed & refined — This article was revised to meet our editorial standards.

Source: Based on a video by Joe Rogan Experience — Watch original video

This article was created by NoTime2Watch's editorial team using AI-assisted research. All content includes substantial original analysis and is reviewed for accuracy before publication.

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