Tanner Boser spent Wednesday’s UFC Edmonton media day doing something fighters rarely pull off, which is complaining about judges in a way that actually holds together. Most of these rants are sour grapes with a microphone in front of them. Boser’s came with a concession, a thesis and an admission that he doesn’t have a fix. I’ll take that over a guy with a confident five-point plan every time.
Start with the concession, because it’s what earns him a hearing. “They get way more right than they do wrong,” he told Cageside Press. He also said that “for the most part, most fights get scored right.” That’s a 22-11-1 heavyweight who has eaten some bad cards, and he still won’t tell you the whole system is broken. He saves his fire for one specific thing, the part commissions hate discussing. Who’s holding the pencil?
“Who are the judges? Were they fighters? Because if they’re not, you don’t really know what you’re watching,” Boser said. Then came the line that should be printed on every commission’s letterhead: “So if you don’t know you want me to fcking sit there and score figure skating? Dude, I don’t fcking know what I’m watching.”
He’s right, and the figure skating bit lands because it flips the usual argument. Nobody would hand a cage fighter a scorecard at the Winter Olympics and call it a qualified panel. Boser’s complaint is about judges who, in his words, have “been grandfathered in” after years on the commission, with seniority doing the work that knowledge should. Tenure is a fine reason to give a guy a parking spot. It’s a lousy reason to let him decide someone’s purse.
The Latifi Card
As Yahoo Sports and Sherdog laid out, Boser dropped back-to-back decisions to Andrei Arlovski in 2020 and Ilir Latifi in 2021. He takes responsibility for the Arlovski loss. He still believes he deserved the nod against Latifi.
That split is why I believe him. A fighter who calls every loss a robbery is a fighter you mute. A fighter who says one of those two was on him and one wasn’t is giving you an honest ledger, and a 50 percent grievance rate is about as self-critical as this sport gets. “I’ve lost a couple of fights fair and square, I’ve lost a couple of absolute bullsh*t decisions. And everybody knows it,” he said.
What It Did to His Fighting
This is the part bettors should care about. Boser said the questionable losses changed his approach, which is now “a lot more intentionally violent.” His reasoning: “Points only matter if the judges are paying attention, and you can’t f*cking count on that. So I go there looking to kill, and by doing so, you’re also a lot more ready to die.”
Read that again with your wallet open. A fighter who doesn’t trust the cards is telling you, out loud, that he’s taking on more risk. Risk runs in both directions. Boser is coming off a stoppage loss to Gokhan Saricam that snapped a two-fight winning streak, so the “ready to die” half of that sentence already showed up on his record. Whatever the moneyline says on Saturday, the method-of-victory market is where his comments actually live. A guy who has decided decisions are a coin flip run by strangers is a guy who would rather end the night early, one way or the other.
The 15-Minute Problem
Boser also went after the crowd that says you should never leave it in the judges’ hands. “You can’t kill everybody in 15 minutes,” he said. That’s 900 seconds against another trained heavyweight who spent a camp preparing specifically for you. Finishing rates are a function of the matchup, and the advice to simply go out and finish the guy usually comes from people who have never had to finish anybody.
His honesty about solutions is refreshing too. Asked about the five-judge system that has been floated before, borrowed from kickboxing, he said, “Five judges might help, I don’t know. Who knows? I don’t.”
I’ll answer for him. Five judges dilutes one bad vote, which is worth something. It does nothing about the problem he actually identified. Five people who don’t know what they’re watching are still five people who don’t know what they’re watching, and adding seats to the panel just spreads the confusion around. The fix that follows from Boser’s own argument is a qualification standard: combat sports background, or a real scoring exam that grandfathered judges have to pass like everybody else. He didn’t propose that. His logic gets you there anyway.
He summed up his position about as cleanly as possible: “I don’t have a solution, but I’ll b*tch about it.” Fair enough. Complaining with a correct diagnosis beats fixing with the wrong one.
Boser, the lone Edmonton fighter on the card, meets Jhonata Diniz on Saturday, Oct. 17 at Rogers Place. If he means what he said, the three people cageside won’t get much say in it.
