It seems to me that no matter how lopsided a boxing match is the scoring indicates that it was nip and tuck all the way.
Last night’s Mayweather/Judah match is a good example. Apparently Mayweather pretty well beat the snot out of Judah for most of the fight, but the final scores were 116-112, 117-111 and 119-109, all for Mayweather. The AP referred to that as a “deservedly comfortable margin.”
A comfortable margin? That’s 684 points scored over 10 rounds altogether and only 20 points separated the two boxers. That’s a 3% differential. To the casual observer it would look like all Judah needed were a couple of good punches and he would have won. In any other sport I can think of a 3% difference in the score would indicate a close match but not in boxing. So what’s up with the goofy boxing scores?
The winner of a round gets 10 points. The loser of the round usually gets 8 or 9 points. If the guy who lost the fight won a few rounds, that’s the difference.
Note also that boxers can have points taken away by fouling, usually no more than 1 point in a round, so you can get scores of 9-9 or 9-8 if the round’s winner lost a point.
This system is called the “10 point must” system, since someone must get 10 points. Most, rounds are scored 10-9, with additional points taken off for knockdowns. It’s rare to get scores with a wider spread than 10-7. If it gets that overmatched, the guy on the losing end is typically going to be knocked out soon enough, then who cares about the score?
It’s better than a round by round system that doesn’t distinguish between an eked out victory and a dominating performance, but the point spread is unusually small in most bouts.
So in practice you could have a “2-point must” system where the winner of the round gets 2 points, the loser gets 1 point unless he gets the living snot beat out of him in which case he gets no points.
Hmmm… It reminds me of those arcade pinball games where you got 10,000 points just for bouncing your ball off any old bumper.
To add to what everyone else has said, since we know 8 points is the minimum amount the losing boxer typically gets in a round, without penalties, just subtract 96 points from both scores - in essense, the “noise score” to get a true picture of the score. This, Mayweather won by scores of 20-16, 21-15, and 23-13, and that’s being generous because he didn’t actually get knocked down every round and so his real scores should be based on 9 points a round.
Or look at it this way; assuming a 1 point difference per round, the judges scored it, by rounds won, 8-4, 9-3, and 11-1.