Could we finally be approaching a miraculous time where eye pokes in MMA are punished swiftly and without mercy? Following a recent gathering of multiple MMA commission heads and officials, we might.<\/p>\n
The 2026 Combat Sports Officials Summit went down from January 9th to 11th in Las Vegas, hosted by legendary referee \u201cBig\u201d John McCarthy. The event was an opportunity for officials from all corners of combat sports from boxing to MMA to bare knuckle to come together and learn from each other. They also took the time to address eye pokes in MMA, which has been an issue for years<\/a> but may finally have enough momentum to get dealt with following multiple<\/a> high profile incidents.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cExtended fingers and eye-pokes,\u201d McCarthy told the assembled referees (via Uncrowned\u2019s Ben Fowlkes).<\/a> \u201cIt\u2019s a fricking problem. And it\u2019s your fault.\u201d<\/p>\n Collectively, the referees in attendance agree that they haven\u2019t been penalizing fouls the way they should, especially eye pokes. At this point it\u2019s well-known that everyone gets a few free fouls before a stern warning gets issued. With this level of laissez-faire reffing in play, it would almost be foolish for fighters<\/a> to NOT foul their opponents.<\/p>\n But what to do about it? Referees have been accused of shrinking away from aggressively taking points because a single point in a three round fight creates such a massive shift in outcome. And the rules allow them to forgive fighters that \u2018unintentionally\u2019 eye-poke their opponents. That may be coming to a end, according to California Athletic Commission head Andy Foster.<\/p>\n \u201cI think one of the things you may see coming out of the rules committee this cycle is we\u2019re going to get rid of this intentional vs. unintentional foul language,\u201d Foster told Uncrowned. \u201cIt\u2019s very rare that you see someone just come out with a foul on purpose and intentionally try to do something egregious to harm their opponent. Intent is not the point. The fact is the foul happened and we\u2019ve got to do something about it. So we\u2019re looking to get rid of that language, because it\u2019s antiquated.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not what\u2019s actually happening and we\u2019ve got to adapt.\u201d<\/p>\n Ten years ago, commissions changed the rules<\/a> to bar fighters from extending their fingers outward towards their opponents\u2019 face (aka \u2019the Jon Jones technique\u2019).<\/a> And while that resulted in some more warnings from refs, it didn\u2019t stop pokes from continuing to happen.<\/p>\n The only thing that\u2019s going to get fighters\u2019 hands under control is a fear of punishment, which doesn\u2019t exist under the current rules. Will the rule change Foster mentioned work? Only if referees widely enforce it, and we\u2019re not particularly hopeful on that front.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Could we finally be approaching a miraculous time where eye pokes in MMA are punished swiftly and without…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,33601,638,82],"class_list":["post-417815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-latest-ufc-mma-news","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417815","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=417815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}