In this video interview with FightHype, Mikey Garcia takes the words right out of my mouth to explain how he scored Cotto-Canelo a draw. In doing so, Mikey really highlights some salient points about how people score fights.
In particular, Garcia mentions that he gave Cotto credit for sticking to his game plan and being able to outwork Canelo despite not being able to push back the larger man with his punches. He also believes that the judges didn't credit that game plan at all, and simply appeared to score Canelo coming forward and landing heavier punches.
Yes, Canelo landed the heavier punches in the fight, but that's mostly because he was the much heavier man inside the ring. So should those punches count for more, and should we hold it against Cotto that he couldn't put a dent in the bigger man? If it was solely about who could do more damage with singular shots, then we had a foregone conclusion heading into the ring because of the size differential. Myself, looking at it through the same lens as Garcia here, gave credit to Cotto for fighting smart and doing what he had to do to hang in there with someone he couldn't just stand and trade with -- but even Cotto did that in spots.
Ultimately this really just boils down to subjective preferences. It was a close fight, and probably one that will be discussed to death for the foreseeable future. Some people scored it close, others had it wide, and certain people from both groups can see no possible way to view it from the others perspective. So that sort of begs the question -- which biases did you bring going into the fight?