Believe You Me<\/a> and was asked about recent rules meetings in the wake of the fallout of UFC 321, where Tom Aspinall vs. Ciryl Gane ended in a no-contest after Gane delivered a fight-ending eye poke.<\/p>\n\u201cSo far, what we\u2019re talking about is, we\u2019ve made rules,\u201d Dean said. \u201cSo we made a rule it\u2019s a foul to extend the fingers towards the eyes. That\u2019s the rule we\u2019ve already had in place. So that rule has been there, but we haven\u2019t been enforcing it. So we\u2019re going to move forward on that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people would not have been used to seeing someone get a point taken, because most of the time when we take a point, it\u2019s more of a reactive to the damaging and the unbalancing of the fight that\u2019s been done by a foul, and that\u2019s the only way we can think to balance it. But this right here is a dangerous foul and somebody\u2019s going to keep doing a dangerous action. We should start taking points by them doing that action before it actually happens to hurt somebody.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other thing about MMA is, I mean, we have a one-point sport,\u201d Dean continued. \u201cThe majority of three-round fights, what\u2019s the score? 29-28. So you take one point, you\u2019ve taken a majority of wins and turned it into a draw. But we\u2019re going to have to do something, so that\u2019s one of the things we\u2019ve thought about that we\u2019re going to be doing. That\u2019s something that\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eye pokes, and referees refusing to enforce rules and penalties has been a huge problem in the sport. Every event there seems to be a questionable issue, and Dean hopes that he and his colleagues are going to take an important step forward in changing that.<\/p>\n
When it comes to the fingers and eye pokes, Dean says fighters should look towards the former UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland in how to compete without fouling.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other thing is writing some more guidelines for exactly what is the foul,\u201d Dean explained. \u201cThat last foul, the one with Aspinall, I think the fingers were up, right? So we can agree the fingers were up\u2026 so we might have to change that, and also, because there\u2019s a lot of times even when you\u2019re pawing\u2026 when you get to the end of your reach, automatic, your fingers start to come down as you\u2019re reaching out. \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Sean Strickland fights, I know he has a bad boy image, I\u2019m not trying to make him a teacher\u2019s pet. But, man, he\u2019s my favorite when I see him come out [with his fingers closed], and he\u2019s parrying [all around]. I don\u2019t have to worry about the fingers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Longtime referee Herb Dean says there will be stricter guidelines when it comes to eye pokes in MMA.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,82,640,702],"class_list":{"0":"post-276559","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}