Round lengths

In the middle of a few really slow weeks of fight and having trouble thinking of things to blog about. So for this one I figured I would throw in my two cents on the length of rounds and it will branch off into a scoring argument.

There is a lot of rumblings for major non-title fights going to 5 rounds and there are to a lesser extent some people saying that title fights should go to 7 rounds. I am on board for those, but with a twist. If you were to do that, you would get even fewer fights than you do on PPV. I already don't like that I only get 6 or maybe 7 fights on a PPV broadcast. For my $55, I want to see as many fights as I can on UFC cards. If you were to go to 5 rounds for non-title fights and 7 rounds for title fights, the UFC will have to schedule 4 main card bouts and a swing bout for cards with one title fight and for cards with two title fights, you would probably have to have 3 scheduled and 1 swing fight. A normal person could get more on, but UFC always has horrible time management on their PPV broadcasts. No matter how good the fights are, there is a chance you might only get to see 4 fights if they all went the distance. I want more than that for my money. And for the people who say it will mean 15 minute fights that are great even better because you will get 10 more minutes, that argument doesn't fly with me cause it goes the other way as well as really bad fights will have 10 more minutes of crap.

My solution is to go to 4 minute rounds. I really like 4 minute rounds. 3 minutes is too short and 5 minutes can be too long half the time. IFL having 4 minute rounds was one of the things I liked best about their promotion. It gives the ground guys enough time to work despite what some people say. Some people would hate it, but they would whine and bitch about it for 6 months, realize it's here to stay, and stop worrying about it. If the rounds were 4 minutes long, that would make non-title fights 5 rounds and 20 minutes and title fights would be 7 rounds and 28 minutes. Yes you might get one less fight on cards, but I would be willing to sacrifice one fight to give every fight an extra 3 to 5 minutes to decide the outcome. And in theory, more rounds in smaller time frames should lead to more accurate scorecards from the judges.