Dan Miragliotta got it wrong, so says ‘Big’ John McCarthy.
On Saturday night, Miragliotta refereed the main event of UFC Vegas 123 between Renato Moicano and Tom Nolan, where he made one of the most controversial reffing decisions in recent MMA history. After Moicano dominated the first round with back control using a body triangle, he got into the same position in the second round against Nolan and appeared to be on his way to a comfortable lead in the fight — until Miragliotta inexplicably stood
the fight up from the position. After the stand-up, Nolan quickly hurt Moicano, shifting the momentum in the fight, leading to a third-round TKO win for Nolan.
Afterward, Miragliotta came under fire from seemingly everyone in MMA, and on Monday, veteran referee John McCarthy was not happy with Miragliotta’s performance.
“What’s the purpose of MMA? The purpose of MMA is to showcase that your skillset is better than your opponent’s,” McCarthy said on the Weighing In podcast. “… If I can make my skillset work against your skillset, then that’s what MMA is about. This isn’t something for anybody.
“I love Dan Miragliotta. He’s a great guy, and I know that he’s 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, ‘Hey, if you want to stay there, improve your position.’ If you’re in guard, that’s a 50/50 position, so you can improve your position by getting to a half-guard. Because what you’re doing, you’re improving some of your skillsets — some of them kind of go away to a point — but you’re also dismantling some of your opponent’s.
“If 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’ll sit there and tell people, ‘Improve your position.’ I’ll even say it from half-guard. If you’re not doing enough within the fight to actually make the fight possibly come to a conclusion, you’re gonna tell them you’ve got to improve your position. Meaning, I want you to work. …
“But I’ve never taken someone out of back control, because when it gets to back control, how do I tell you to improve? You’ve gotten to the very best position that you can get to in MMA. A position where your opponent doesn’t have a chance of finishing you. …
“So you’ve gotten to a position where your opponent can’t finish you, but you can finish your opponent, and that’s what our sport is about. That’s 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’t do damage to you.”
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’s action was the result of fans booing, McCarthy has a different perspective.
“When you take a look at what’s going through Dan’s mind at the time, I’m not too sure it’s so much the crowd; I think it’s in his head, he’s looking at, ‘I gave you a full round, five minutes, basically, of you having someone’s back,” McCarthy said. “I gave you that full round, and you weren’t able to finish him with that, and you’ve come out here and, let’s say I’ve given you now half a round … and you still haven’t finished this fight, I’m gonna make it to where, let’s change this up so we can work toward a finish.’ That’s not your responsibility. That’s not your job. Your job is to be fair, and the true factor in this is, you’re being completely unfair to one fighter, because he is doing things.
“If Moicano is sitting there and he takes Nolan’s back and he gets in a seatbelt position, he’s got the figure-four body lock, and he puts his arms in the seatbelt position, and he’s now holding Nolan tight to him, and there’s nothing going on other than the seatbelt … 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’s back before the stand-up; he had to throw 20-25 strikes. Why’s he doing that? He’s 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’t know, and you’ll never know until you let it happen. …
“The 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,” McCarthy added later. “And I mean stalling it, as far as they’re not doing anything. They’re laying on top of their opponent in guard, or they’re just putting pressure in half-guard. But any time it gets to back control, it has to be so egregious — and I’m talking four and a half minutes of being in a seatbelt position doing nothing. OK, fine, I’ll stand you up, because you’re not doing anything. All you’re doing is trying to let the clock go by so you can win a round based upon your positioning.”
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’s leading refereeing and judging course, and he says Miragliotta broke one of the cardinal rules he tells participants in his course.
“You cannot make a bad fight good, but you can definitely make a good fight bad,” McCarthy said. “I’m 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. …
“Dan Miragliotta is a fantastic person; he’s been a fantastic official,” McCarthy added later. “We all make mistakes we look back on. I’m not sure he’s looking back on it saying, ‘Maybe I made a mistake.’ Maybe he thinks he’s right. And that’s OK, but you have to be right for the sport, and the sport tells you, in that position, that’s not the time to be standing someone up.”
