UFC official Herb Dean has taken the extraordinary step of explaining his decision at UFC Freedom 250.
Some had criticized him for not calling Ciryl Gane’s punches to the back of Alex Pereira’s head at the end of their fight.
Dean released a video on Instagram to detailing his approach.
“I can tell from the comments online I owe you guys an explanation about the rules and how I refereed the fight. First of all, all respect to both fighters. I am talking about Gane and Pereira. It was an amazing fight,” he began.
He then illustrated his point using a stand-in.
“The rule we’re talking about is the back of the head and that’s confusing because it’s different than boxing, The way we enforce this rule is we focus on the nape of the neck. I guess that’s really what the rule should be called. The nape of the neck occipital junction also covers the spine and covers a line right here with one-inch variance to either side, right here. So, this is what we go over in a rules meeting. I’ll let them know that this area is about off-limits,” he said showing where a blow is fair and where it is a foul.
“Hopefully that’s usual for you guys and clear things up at all,” he said.
Alex Pereira took to his YouTube channel to criticize how the fight was handled.
“Putting myself in the referee’s shoes, my opponent’s there and catches me, I drop, he starts striking. The ref is watching that they are illegal shots but he thinks like this, ‘How am I going to stop this fight?’ It’s illegal, it’s in the rules. You’re not going to be wrong if you stop it. It’s in the rules; you stop it. “If people say, ‘Why did you stop it?’ Look at the video; nobody was going to say anything about the ref. In that scenario, people give him credit as a man but now he is not a man. He shouldn’t have been refereeing that fight. To be honest, a guy like that should be punished. That’s how it is. It’s a very serious job. It’s a very serious event. What happened, the ref should’ve faced legal consequences for that,” he said about Herb Dean.
He explained that he thought the blows he took were illegal.
“If you watch the footage, multiple shots there, multiple elbows. Okay, sure, the jab, but given everything that happened, illegal. I was getting up, it became difficult to recover but I believe that if it wasn’t for those shots I [wouldn’t] be in that situation and could’ve possibly recovered. Maybe not, but they were very hard shots and illegal,” he said.
Gane defeated Pereira to become the new Interim UFC Heavyweight Champion by TKO at 1 minute and 27 seconds of round two of their fight at UFC Freedom 250.
