Scoring Ward-Kovalev using more of the 10 available points per round

No I didn't watch the fight again. I just scored it with a different scoring system I like others have mentioned before that boxing shouldn't be scored on the pretty much rounds system that it currently is. That doesn't reflect how clearly the winner won. More of the available 10 points should be used to score a round. That indicates the degree the winner won the round by, and the total score would then better reflect who controlled and won the whole fight, rather than who won more rounds.

So: winning a round slightly is 10-9, a clear win 10-8, a dominant round 10-7, and a round in which one guy thoroughly outclasses or beats up the other 10-6. In fact, I don't have to follow the official scoring convention, I'm going to score every fight I score like this now.

Here's how I have Ward-Kovalev...

1 Kovalev 10-8
2 Kovalev 10-7
3 Kovalev 10-9
4 Ward 10-9
5 Ward 10-8
6 Ward 10-8
7 Ward 10-8
8 Ward 10-8
9 Ward 10-8
10 Kovalev 10-8
11 Ward 10-8
12 Kovalev 10-9

So 111-107 Ward. I consider the 3rd, 4th, and 12th the close, swing rounds that could've gone either way, the rest I'm confident each guy definitely deserved. I really think Ward had figured out Kovalev's attack and was outthinking him and controlling the fight from the 5th through the 9th, even if he wasn't significantly outlanding Kovalev. The number of rounds won was so close that we should have to dig deeper in scoring what happened to separate the two. How would anyone else score the fight using this system?

 

I'm not the first person to suggest the scoring system should be refined and more of the available 10 points used. Fights that end up with close scores often weren't close. I'm not saying Ward-Kovalev wasn't very close, just that attempting to differentiate them by scoring how clear a round's were won might show that one guy deserved the fight by more than a point. It's a worthy point of discussion.

 

Yes, on continuing to look back at Kovalev-Ward rounds a scoring change like this isn't a significant improvement. There would sometimes be controversy, often fight-changing, over whether a round should be 10-8 vs 10-9 or 10-8 vs 10-7. I do think boxing scoring has to reflect the degree a round was won by though. There's often a world of difference between 10-9 rounds, and a fighter who dominates 5 rounds and controls the fight as a whole as much as his opponent ends up having to be the clear loser. Maybe there's a better format than what I suggested, but I don't think mine is any worse than the current method.

 

I can accept that much. I like the concept, but it gives more power to the judges and assumes their absolute competence and understanding, not to mention integrity.