EXCLUSIVE | Rory MacDonald Wants Review Board For MMA Judges

Rory MacDonald has an idea on how to improve MMA judging.

This past weekend, we saw several bad decisions at UFC Vegas 32. Francis Ngannou has since spoken out against the extremely poor judging of MMA fights that more often than not leaves unlucky fighters out of pocket.

MacDonald was on the wrong end of a bad call in his last fight. ‘The Red King’ squared off against Gleison Tibau at PFL 5 on June 17. The former Bellator champion seemed to have eased to a decision win after three rounds of fighting before the judges shockingly awarded Tibau a split decision victory.

At the PFL 5 post-fight press conference MacDonald called for an investigation into the result he called a “clear robbery.”

In a recent interview with LowKickMMA, MacDonald revealed he was unable to right the wrong done to him at PFL 5, he said.

“We’d looked into what we could do (to overturn the result), but really our hands are tied. There’s nothing we could really have done.”

MacDonald wants to see more ex-fighters judging and also wants to see judges be held accountable for their poor work.

The 32-year-old even suggested a strike-based system to eliminate the bad officials.

“That would help (having ex-fighters judge) and also some accountability,” MacDonald said. “I said something like maybe like a board that would review controversial decisions and scorecards. You know, if it’s too many strikes for a certain judge, they get removed.

“Right now, (in) the current format, these judges just do whatever they want bad, or good and they keep their job and they keep moving forward,” MacDonald added. “But for the people who are fighting and have to live with the consequences is us the fighters. You know, even though we do our end of the job, we end up suffering and they just continue on, get paid, and move forward.”

Do you agree with Rory MacDonald? Would a strike-based system help improve the level of MMA judging?