Herb Dean doesn\u2019t believe he has anything to apologize about regarding his refereeing of the Alex Pereira vs. Ciryl Gane fight at UFC White House.<\/p>\n
Gane stopped Pereira with strikes just 1:27 into the second round, but there\u2019s a lot of controversy surrounding the finish, which seemed to feature \u201cBon Gamin\u201d landing several big strikes to the back of \u201cPoatan\u2019s\u201d head (watch the highlights here).<\/a> Pereira released a video on Tuesday complaining about those illegal strikes, saying he asked Dean to watch out for Gane hitting the back of his head, and subsequently accusing Dean of \u2018not being a man.\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n For his part, Dean didn\u2019t get personal with Pereira. He just gave a refresher course for MMA fans on what \u2018back of the head\u2019 means.<\/p>\n \u201cI could tell by some of the comments online that I owe you guys an explanation about the rules and how I refereed the fight,\u201d Dean said in a new video. \u201cFirst of all, all respect to both fighters. I\u2019m talking about Gane and Pereira. Amazing fight. Okay, so let\u2019s get into it with this rule.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe rule we\u2019re we\u2019re talking about is the back of the head, and that\u2019s confusing because it\u2019s different than boxing,\u201d he continued. \u201cAnd the way we enforce this rule is is we focus on the nape of the neck, and that\u2019s really what the rule should be called. The nape of the neck or occipital junction also covers the spine and covers a [mohawk] line right here with one inch variance to either side.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo this is what we\u2019d go over in a rules meeting. I will let them know that this area [neck and mohawk] is a foul, off limits, that this area [sides of back of head] is a fair blow \u2026 Hopefully, that\u2019s useful to you guys and clear things up at all.\u201d<\/p>\n We doubt that explanation has fans feeling any better, but perhaps the following video will. It\u2019s a slow motion shot of the final moments of Pereira vs. Gane that shows most of Gane\u2019s punches and elbows landing in the region Dean described as legal.<\/p>\n In the moment at full speed, it looked like Gane smashed Pereira with a non-stop barrage of illegal blows to the back of the head. In slow motion, it drops to two definite illegal strikes. Given the amount of movement and chaos in the finishing moments of the fight, do you say Gane did well only hitting Pereira with two illegal strikes? Or do you believe the dirty bastard was going for more and just missed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Herb Dean doesn\u2019t believe he has anything to apologize about regarding his refereeing of the Alex Pereira vs.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":742397,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85,1396,125620],"class_list":["post-742396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc-news","tag-ufc-white-house-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/742397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}