Joe Rogan defends Dan Miragliotta

Articles abound on excellence in MMA. The greatest fights, the greatest fighters, the greatest techniques, the greatest promotions, the greatest cards all get their due. Refereeing you only hear about when something goes wrong.

In the UFC 210 co-main event, referee Dan Miragliotta stopped the fight when he thought Chris Weidman received a knee to the head from Gegard Mousasi while grounded. He stopped the bout to give The All American time to recover; during the break Miragliotta conferred with John McCarthy who informed him that a replay showed Weidman was actually up. The fight doctor said Weidman was unfit to continue, and then Mousasi was declared the winner.

Miragliotta was widely criticized, but during a recent appearance on The Church of What’s Happening Now, UFC color commentator Joe Rogan offered a defense.

Here’s two reasons why it’s hard for Miragliotta, said Rogan, as transcribed byJed Meshew for MMA Fighting. First of all, he’s a giant. You have to understand, Dan Miragliotta is like, 6-foot-5, 300 pounds. He’s a huge man. He’s f***ing huge. He towers over most of the fighters. So he’s above these guys, and if Mousasi is pinning down Weidman, so he’s got him in a headlock and he’s pulling him down and he’s kneeing him the face like he was, think of how tall Miragliotta is in the first place.

Now think, he’s looking down at these guys kneeing each other in the head and he’s got to stay close by in case something happens. There’s no way he could see those hands from where he was standing. So he took an educated guess based on his many, many years of refereeing that both hands were down. And it was so close, you would have to be on the other side of the ring looking at the ground to know whether or not they were touching. If you’re above it the way Miragliotta was, how could he know? He really couldn’t know and it’s not his fault. He’s an excellent referee.

The fault is that the athletic commission, under situations like this, doesn’t use an instant replay and they should because it’s the fair thing to do to make sure that the fight is fair.

I think Weidman could have gone on. Had there been a question about whether or not it was illegal, they could look at the instant replay and then they make the call. ‘The strikes are legal, we’re gonna continue.’ And you either continue them from the exact same position or you have a protocol in place, like you have to separate them, go back to their corners, and re-engage, which is bad for Mousasi because Mousasi had him in a good position and was landing strikes.

It wasn’t Dan’s decision to stop the fight. It was the commission’s decision, I’m pretty sure and I think it’s because they didn’t know what else to do. They didn’t have a thing to do in place. It’s hard. It takes a while to figure out how to correctly referee and judge and officiate in a state athletic commission that hasn’t had mixed martial arts before and all of a sudden they have it. . . And then the commission, unfortunately, though the referees that were in place were really high level, there’s a commission that’s really not used to doing this. It’s not their fault, they just don’t have the experience.

It’s just unfortunate for Weidman, unfortunate for Mousasi, unfortunate for the whole division. . . The whole thing is unfortunate.

The Church of What’s Happening Now, with Joey Coco Diaz