Media scorecards - why are they all different?

I've been doing a bit of reading around media score cards, in particular guys who have displayed their Round by Round scoring and the thing that makes me laugh is how many people state "OMG, THIS WAS SUCH A BAD DECISION" yet even those who have Pacquaio at 118-110, 117-111, 116-112 and 115-113 tend to disagree on the rounds they give Bradley in the fight

Doesn't that indicate that the fight wasn't as easy to score as these geniuses are making out?

The common consensus within Eastside Boxing is that Bradley did enough to win Rounds 1, 10, 11 and 12.

Random review of media scoring

Doug Fischer - scored 117-111 - gave Bradley 1, 6 and 7.
http://ringtv.craveonline.com/blog/173285-dougies-monday-mailbag

Harold Lederman - Scored 119-109 - gave Bradley 10
Rafael - Scored 119-109 - gave Bradley 1
Freddie Roach - gave Bradley 11 and 12
Arum - gave Bradley 2
Tim Dahlberg - gave Bradley 1, 8, 9.
Andre Ward - gave Bradley 2, 8, 10, 12
Kevin Iole - gave Bradley 2, 6, 11
Ron Borges - gave Bradley 1, 2, 8 and 9

Even in those that gave Pacquaio the fight, there is a lot of discrepancy in which rounds they actually gave to Bradley. This fight was not as clear cut as people make out and that's seen by the amount of differential scorecards even when they all agree on Pacquaio being 117-111 or 116-112.

Makes me ****ing laugh how much insight is coming out about this fight and how people scored it. It must be one of the worst mixed bag of score cards for a "fight that someone clearly dominated" I've ever seen.

 

It was a closer bout than it has been made out to be.

 

Just because I've got some time to kill

Barry Tompkins, Showtime: 119-110 Pacquiao - Gave Round 2 to Bradley
Harold Lederman, HBO: 119-109 Pacquiao - Gave Round 10 to Bradley
Ray Markarian, The Sweet Science: 119-109 Pacquiao Gave Round 11 to Bradley
Michael Marley, Examiner: 119-109 Pacquiao - Gave Round 2 to Bradley
Dan Rafael, ESPN: 119-109 Pacquiao Gave Round 1 to Bradley
Vittorio Tafur, San Francisco Chronicle: 119-109 Pacquiao Gave Round 9 to Bradley
Michael Woods, The Sweet Science: 119-109 Pacquiao Gave Round 12 to Bradley

So even out of those who only gave Bradley one round each we have 1, 2, 9, 10, 11, 12 from just 7 ringside reports. 6 different rounds from 7 guys who all felt Pacquaio dominated the fight.

That's a very telling statistic.

 

Just one of those rare fights.

I thought Bradley clearly won the first round and all the peeps that I watched it with laughed at me.

 

That's a great point.

 

With being extra generous with no sound I gave Bradley rounds 1, 6 , 10 and 11

Anyone who gave him round 9 needs their heads examined. that was Pacquaios best round of the fight

 

It was also Bradleys best too. He landed some of his most effective body and head shots in that round and went toe to toe with Pacquaio. I remember marking that round down as being the most exciting because for me, it reawoke me from the slumber of the middle rounds where Pacquaio was just a class above, that was the round that Bradley started to get some **** moving again.

 

not really. To get a read, you'd need the scores of all the judges and calculate the proportions for each round.

And what you'd find is that only rounds 1, 10,11,12 would have high proportions (> .5) for Bradley.

 

yeah, round 9 was close. Pacquiao nicked it, but barely.

 

Right - but then you've got such a different array of which rounds people who felt Pacquaio dominated the fight gave that it immediately questions how dominant he was in those rounds and how hard (from a judges perspective, in the heat of the moment, without slow motion replays and an over zealous broadcast team) this fight was to actually judge on a round by round basis.

That's the point I'm making. The more insights that come out about this fight, the more no one can really say it's a robbery, simply a fight that Pacquaio dominated in spurts but left too many rounds open for Tim to do good work in.

The one thing that does blow my mind is how any judge gave Bradley Round 5, let alone all three judges doing so - I can't reconcile that in my head.

 

True, but the path to 7 rounds for Bradley is highly improbable. Whereas the path to 7 for Pacquiao is easy.

If we use the journalists scores as our sample, then the probability of a picking a judge that finds to 7 rounds for Bradley is 3/51 = .058.

The probability of 2/3 judges getting to 7 rounds for Bradley is .009.

 

Despite me scoring it 116-112 and at best, being entirely generous, only finding 114-114 to Bradley, I had a different set of rounds to the above "experts" who had reported their scorecards.

And remember, the selection I used above are those who have made collectively the most noise around this fight being "fixed" - when they can't even correlate which rounds Bradley won/lost amongst themselves.

7 different reporters, 6 different results. Talking probability, that means out of those who only gave Bradley a round, there is a 85% chance that they scored the fight wrong against peer review of those who agreed that Manny dominated.

Probability means nothing in boxing, because you don't score fights on probabilities and you don't score fights on the entire fight, you score it on a round by round basis and what we're seeing is that there are a tonne of rounds that people viewed differently, including the judges.

 

The variability occurs because close rounds are difficult to score. The closer that a round is, the more disagreement you wil have on the score. A perfectly ambiguous round will split people right down the middle 50/50. Whereas a perfectly clear round people will always agree on the winner. And then there are gradations in between. So it is probabilistic if you think of the population of judges. And the stand-in for that population are the scores of the journalists. And we can extrapolate from their scores to calculate how unlikely the three judges scores were.

 

Point is, your selection criteria minimises because the bulk of those people aren't sat in judges chairs, with complete judging criteria, six feet away from fighters.

So your selection criteria comes down to a spread of three (ringside judges) and maybe four (Lederman acting as a ringside judge) judges. So again, your probability notion is extremely flawed.

You don't use probabilities in scoring a round, nor a fight. You use spread of how rounds were seen and what we're seeing is huge spread.

 

I can tell you aren't going to law school, because that logic is awful.

Because different people gave some Bradley rounds differently? Maybe they felt sorry for him getting pummeled. Even in absolute ass kickings you will see a variance in scoring, so don't even bring that up.

Remember, swimming against the current will eventually drown you.