"It's just one round" - Rich Franklin explains ONE's judging system

ONE Championship employs its own kind of scoring system for MMA competitions, but ONE Vice President Rich Franklin said it’s really not that different from the system that most people are familiar with.

In an appearance on Morning Kombat, Franklin explained the judging system by comparing it to the 10-point must system that is commonly used in combat sports.

“If you want to think of it this way, just for simplification purposes, we, in essence, use a 10-point must system. It’s just one round. We just take everything and at the end, we say, hey, one person won and one person didn’t win and we use our judging criteria. So it’s really not that much different. The difference is, [that] we don’t use it on a round-by-round basis.”

The 10-point must system awards 10 points to the fighter who wins a round, with the other fighter getting either 9 or fewer points. As such, by the end of three or five rounds, one winner emerges by winning more rounds than his or her opponent.

Franklin explained that it’s the kind of situation that this system tries to avoid.

“So when you run into a situation in a three-round fight where one guy edges out round one and round two, and the other guy just completely blows away round three but he doesn’t score a 10-8 in that round, he ends up losing two rounds to one decision. It’s like, umm, is that really how the fight should have been scored? And we’ve seen these kinds of lopsided fights that happened this way."

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Rich Franklin explains judging criteria of ONE Championship

ONE Championship’s scoring system is based on different categories that fighters must fulfill in order to score points. In the same interview, Rich Franklin shed light on the criteria that judges look out for during fights.

“We have five different categories that are in descending order, starting with (1) aggression, (2) takedown [and] takedown defense, (3) grappling and striking - which are kinda even categories depending on where you want to take the fight - and then we have (4) damage. Our damage is broken down into three categories: superficial, cumulative, and internal. The final category is (5) near KO. They’re weighted, in the order I gave them, from least important to most important. You can be aggressive in a match, but you have to be effectively aggressive by landing strikes. The more strikes you land, then the more damage you do and you start scoring on these higher categories.”

Watch Rich Franklin's appearance on Morning Kombat below:

Catch ONE Championship’s scoring system in action at ONE 157: Petchmorakot vs. Vienot on May 20.