Sherdog’s Top 10: Burglars

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1. Diego Sanchez

If Garcia is the Prince of Thieves, to steal the subtitle of a pretty not-great “Robin Hood” movie starring a sometimes-accented Kevin Costner, then Sanchez is King Richard returning from a successful crusade. Just look at this litany of terrible decision victories: Ross Pearson, Takanori Gomi and Martin Kampmann, all in the last four years. Reaching back a bit further, his wins over Nick Diaz and Karo Parisyan were hardly without controversy, as well.

In its own totally screwed up way, each of Sanchez’s recent undeserved victories has a lesson to teach about a problem with MMA judging. The Pearson scrap, for example, demonstrates the extent to which officials can be influenced by a vocal, hometown crowd that erupts every time the local fighter twitches a muscle. Moreover, Sanchez’s bursts of offense all came at the ends of the rounds, leaving them with the impression that he had done more than he actually had. These are not excuses for awful judging, but they do help to understand the process.

The Gomi fight shows the extent to which takedowns can be overvalued by the judges. All three cageside scorers gave the third round to Gomi and the second to Sanchez, but only Ben Cartlidge awarded the first to the Japanese fighter despite his soundly out-landing the American on the feet and scrambling out of the takedowns.

Finally, the Kampmann fight shows the true limits of just how bad judging can be. Sure, the Pearson bout was an egregious miscarriage of justice, but how anybody could look at a fight in which Sanchez was out-landed by a 3-to-2 margin, went 1-for-15 on takedown attempts and seemed like he was halfway through a bloody facial reconstruction surgery by the end of the third round and still score it for Sanchez is a mistake of truly epic proportions.

We can only hope Sanchez’s reign of face-first, ineffective terror over the judges comes to an end soon.

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Honorable Mentions: Bart Palaszewski, Michihiro Omigawa, Nick Ring, Cathal Pendred

Follow Sherdog.com preview expert Patrick Wyman on Twitter.

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