Weighing In<\/a> podcast. \u201c\u2026 If I can make my skillset work against your skillset, then that\u2019s what MMA is about. This isn\u2019t something for anybody.<\/p>\n\u201cI love Dan Miragliotta. He\u2019s a great guy, and I know that he\u2019s only trying to do what he believes is right, but the fact of the matter is, there are times within MMA where we will tell a fighter, \u2018Hey, if you want to stay there, improve your position.\u2019 If you\u2019re in guard, that\u2019s a 50\/50 position, so you can improve your position by getting to a half-guard. Because what you\u2019re doing, you\u2019re improving some of your skillsets \u2014 some of them kind of go away to a point \u2014 but you\u2019re also dismantling some of your opponent\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have me in guard, you can throw armbars on me, you can throw triangle chokes; there are all kinds of attacks that you have. When you lose that, and now you have me in your half guard, a lot of those submissions go away, so I take away a lot of your offense, while I still have some things for me to do. So we\u2019ll sit there and tell people, \u2018Improve your position.\u2019 I\u2019ll even say it from half-guard. If you\u2019re not doing enough within the fight to actually make the fight possibly come to a conclusion, you\u2019re gonna tell them you\u2019ve got to improve your position. Meaning, I want you to work. \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I\u2019ve never taken someone out of back control, because when it gets to back control, how do I tell you to improve? You\u2019ve gotten to the very best position that you can get to in MMA. A position where your opponent doesn\u2019t have a chance of finishing you. \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you\u2019ve gotten to a position where your opponent can\u2019t finish you, but you can finish your opponent, and that\u2019s what our sport is about. That\u2019s the whole concept of MMA: to be able to put yourself in a position where you can do damage to your opponent, but they can\u2019t do damage to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCarthy has a long history with Miragliotta, as both have been part of the small referee community for many years, and while some suggested that Miragliotta\u2019s action was the result of fans booing, McCarthy has a different perspective.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you take a look at what\u2019s going through Dan\u2019s mind at the time, I\u2019m not too sure it\u2019s so much the crowd; I think it\u2019s in his head, he\u2019s looking at, \u2018I gave you a full round, five minutes, basically, of you having someone\u2019s back,\u201d McCarthy said. \u201cI gave you that full round, and you weren\u2019t able to finish him with that, and you\u2019ve come out here and, let\u2019s say I\u2019ve given you now half a round \u2026 and you still haven\u2019t finished this fight, I\u2019m gonna make it to where, let\u2019s change this up so we can work toward a finish.\u2019 That\u2019s not your responsibility. That\u2019s not your job. Your job is to be fair, and the true factor in this is, you\u2019re being completely unfair to one fighter, because he is doing things.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Moicano is sitting there, and he takes Nolan\u2019s back and he gets in a seatbelt position, he\u2019s got the figure-four body lock, and he puts his arms in the seatbelt position, and he\u2019s now holding Nolan tight to him, and there\u2019s nothing going on other than the seatbelt \u2026 your job is to always try to work toward finishing the fight. If you go back and look during that last minute, he was on Nolan\u2019s back before the stand-up; he had to throw 20-25 strikes. Why\u2019s he doing that? He\u2019s working toward a finish. Which is the one that is going to cause Nolan a problem where he makes a mistake and now the choke gets sunk in? You don\u2019t know, and you\u2019ll never know until you let it happen. \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only time that we should be standing up a fight is when the person who is in control of the fight is the one who is stalling the fight,\u201d McCarthy added later. \u201cAnd I mean stalling it, as far as they\u2019re not doing anything. They\u2019re laying on top of their opponent in guard, or they\u2019re just putting pressure in half-guard. But any time it gets to back control, it has to be so egregious \u2014 and I\u2019m talking four and a half minutes of being in a seatbelt position doing nothing. OK, fine, I\u2019ll stand you up, because you\u2019re not doing anything. All you\u2019re doing is trying to let the clock go by so you can win a round based upon your positioning.\u201d<\/p>\n
McCarthy is one of the most recognizable referees in MMA history, and the man who literally wrote many of the rules that exist in the sport today. He also hosts the sport\u2019s leading refereeing and judging course, and he says Miragliotta broke one of the cardinal rules he tells participants in his course.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou cannot make a bad fight good, but you can definitely make a good fight bad,\u201d McCarthy said. \u201cI\u2019m not saying this ended up being a bad fight; it was exciting with what Nolan did, but he was given the opportunity to be in positions that he never should have been in. \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cDan Miragliotta is a fantastic person; he\u2019s been a fantastic official,\u201d McCarthy added later. \u201cWe all make mistakes we look back on. I\u2019m not sure he\u2019s looking back on it saying, \u2018Maybe I made a mistake.\u2019 Maybe he thinks he\u2019s right. And that\u2019s OK, but you have to be right for the sport, and the sport tells you, in that position, that\u2019s not the time to be standing someone up.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dan Miragliotta got it wrong, so says \u2018Big\u2019 John McCarthy. On Saturday night, Miragliotta refereed the main event…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":950332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-950331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950331","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=950331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/950332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}