If you're getting high tonight and rewatching the most argued-over decisions in UFC history, start with the one that should make you the angriest: Paddy Pimblett over Jared Gordon at UFC 282. That's the worst decision the sport has ever produced, bigger names and bigger cards included. I can tell you exactly who did it.
All three judges, Doug Crosby, Chris Lee and Ron McCarthy, scored it 29-28 for Pimblett. Three state-appointed officials looked at the same fight and landed on the same wrong answer. Meanwhile 23 of 24 media scorecards had it for Gordon. When nearly every person paid to watch fights for a living saw one thing and the only three people who count saw the opposite, three judges handed a winning scorecard to the promotion's rising British star while the promotion sat in the building.
I know the usual nominees. Jon Jones over Dominick Reyes at UFC 247, where Joe Soliz turned in a 49-46 card that said Jones won four rounds of a fight even Dana White thought Reyes led. Petr Yan losing a split to Sean O'Malley at UFC 280, with 25 of 26 media outlets scoring it for Yan. Those are real outrages. But both were split decisions or involved a genuinely competitive championship fight where you can at least construct a path, however dishonest, to the result. Pimblett-Gordon had no split to hide behind. Three judges, one direction, against the entire press corps, and there's nowhere to look.
You have to judge a fight by the standards of its era, and some of these old "robberies" were defensible back when takedowns and octagon control carried more weight. That argument actually saves a few of these. Diego Sanchez beating Martin Kampmann in 2011 is a genuine horror by any era, Kampmann landed 97 of 207 strikes to Sanchez's 45 of 165 and still lost unanimously, but Sanchez's relentless forward pressure and takedown attempts were exactly the kind of thing old-school judging rewarded. Robbie Lawler's split decision over Carlos Condit at UFC 195 gets lumped in with the robberies, but it doesn't belong there. Condit threw more, but Lawler landed a higher percentage and scored the harder knockdown in a real war. That one's a defensible call.
The era defense is useless for Pimblett-Gordon. This happened in December 2022, under modern unified criteria, in a fight the whole sport watched live and scored in real time. There's no antique rulebook to blame here, no takedown-heavy convention from another decade to invoke. The judges just got it wrong, together, in the one direction that happened to suit the promotion.
That's why it's the worst. Paddy didn't do anything wrong, he fought the fight in front of him. The judges are the ones who signed the cards. Crosby, Lee and McCarthy do the scoring, and they're paid by the state to be the one party in that arena with no stake in who wins. Three of them delivered a verdict that matched the house's commercial interest to the letter and contradicted almost everyone else alive. Rank your robberies however you like. This is the one with the cleanest fingerprints.
