Natalia Silva won the vacant UFC women’s flyweight title Saturday in Salt Lake City, and nobody serious argued about the winner. She beat Wang Cong by unanimous decision over five rounds, and by most accounts she was cruising the whole way, with Cong landing in moments rather than winning rounds. Then the cards came back, and two of them read 48-47. In a fight that one-sided, a 48-47 means a judge handed Cong two full rounds. That’s the kind of number that makes you rewind the replay looking for a fight you apparently missed.
Henry Cejudo did more than rewind. On the Pound 4 Pound Podcast, the former two-division champion tore into the judging, calling the situation ridiculous and complaining that the people scoring MMA are older officials who come out of boxing. Then he went back to his favorite fix. Cejudo wants sensor chips in the gloves to measure where and how precisely shots land, plus infrared tracking that could pick up the moment a fighter buckles. When people treated that as science fiction, he had a short answer: “this is 2026, bro.”
His co-host Kamaru Usman wasn’t having it. “I gotta disagree with you there, how is AI supposed to judge this?” Usman asked. Cejudo didn’t budge and said he’d trust a machine before he’d trust the current judges.
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Right diagnosis, wrong medicine
Cejudo is correct about the problem, and I’ll give him that without reservation. “Too many people have been robbed in fights and it’s because sometimes the lack of knowledge from judges, or there’s emotion involved, that’s something you’ve got to consider too,” he said. He also added, “There’s a lot of times where a judge may not like somebody.” Anyone who has watched a cageside official score a fighter’s back take as a lull in the action knows the knowledge gap is real. The Silva cards didn’t cost anyone a belt. Margins still matter, though, because the same judge who finds two rounds for Cong in a fight like that will someday find three for the wrong person in a closer one.
The chip is where he loses me. A sensor in a glove measures contact. It can tell you a fist arrived somewhere with some amount of force. It can’t tell you which fighter is winning a scramble, whether a heel hook entry actually threatened the knee, or whether a fighter on top is doing damage or just parking there. The grappling half of this sport is the half that bad judges already misread, and Cejudo’s machine would misread it worse, because it literally cannot feel it. The lay-and-pray crowd would love a scoring system that only counts punches. I’d hate it, and so would every wrestler who ever chained a single leg into a mat return.
Usman’s question, in other words, is the right one. Nobody has shown how an algorithm grades positional control in a cage.
There’s an irony buried in Cejudo’s complaint too. He blames boxing-minded judges, yet Bloody Elbow reported that AI judging has become regular in boxing, including at Tyson Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk in 2024. Boxing has two weapons and one plane of combat. That’s where a machine has the easiest job. Porting that to a sport with takedowns, cage work and submissions solves a different sport’s problem.
The fix already exists, it just isn’t staffed
Earlier this year at UFC Sacramento, former UFC fighter Chris Leben worked the night as a judge, and Dana White has said he’d love to see more retired fighters move into judging. Cejudo’s response to that idea was blunt: “That’s not what we have, though.” He’s right about the present. He’s wrong that the present is permanent. Putting people who have actually been stuck under a heavy top game into those chairs addresses the knowledge gap directly, and it doesn’t require anyone to sew hardware into a four-ounce glove.
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The practical hurdle is who decides. The UFC rolled out AI-powered rankings with Meta this year, but rankings are opinions the promotion is free to publish. Scorecards are official results, and Bloody Elbow noted that athletic commissions are unlikely to adopt AI judging because of accuracy concerns. Cejudo can lobby the UFC all he wants. The commissions hold the pencils.
My position is simple. Use the data as a tool for judges and as an audit after the fact, so a 48-47 in a lopsided fight gets flagged and reviewed. Train the officials on grappling until they can tell a guard pass from a stall. Hire more Lebens. Keep the final call with someone who knows what a buckle looks like without infrared.
Silva now sits atop a division where the next title fight will almost certainly spend stretches on the mat, and BJPenn is already running predictions that Valentina Shevchenko would have her hands full against her. When that fight happens, I want five rounds scored by people who can read a clinch and know a body lock from a hug.
