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A veteran referee gives his take on Herb Dean’s controversial stoppage at UFC on ESPN 14.
Many people were quick to throw Herb Dean under the bus after UFC commentator Dan Hardy scolded the veteran referee following his controversial stoppage in the Francisco Trinaldo vs. Jai Herbert fight at UFC on ESPN 14 on Saturday.
Hardy feels the fight was stopped too late, but Dean says he made the right call by giving Herbert the chance to defend himself after Trinaldo dropped him with a big overhand left in the third round.
‘Big’ John McCarthy sympathises with Dean and says his ex-colleague was in a no-win situation on Saturday night.
“Jai’s really good. Really talented. Good movement, a nice smooth stand-up fighter and he did well in the clinches and stuff,” McCarthy said on a recent episode of Weighing In, per BJPenn.com. “He was fighting really well. But, Jai gets hit and the shot that hits him goes off basically the top of his forehead. The top of his head and you see him go stumble back and fall the way he did. It’s like he got hit in the head with a hammer. And you know as the referee it’s one of those… It is an oddity knockdown. Not your norm. But when he falls how did he fall? He fell going backwards and was he still there?”
“Doesn’t look like it. But, when Herb Dean sees him he comes around and he sees him fall down like this (motioning straight back) and he sees him with his hands in a position to defend himself. So Herb is thinking (Herbert) can defend himself and Trinaldo just stopped. Now Trinaldo stopped because he is a competitor, a sportsman and felt like he’s out. I shouldn’t have to hit him again. But, he has to continue on. So the fact that Trinaldo didn’t immediately go after him, makes it now where Herb really can’t stop it, in a way, because he is saying he’s in there defending himself. Could he have stopped it? He could have. But, there would have been people complaining about him stopping it. There would have been people saying ‘Oh you didn’t give him the opportunity’ to try and you know work his way out. So you’re in that can’t win.”
As for Hardy’s remarks and unapologetic follow-up statement on Instagram, McCarthy chalked ‘The Outlaw’s emotional reaction to his close friendship with Herbert outside of the cage.
“You know the fact that Dan Hardy is friends with Jai, likes him and watches him fight in England,” the former referee turned Bellator commentator said. “Well he got all upset because his guy took extra shots and ok. But, if Dan Hardy was the guy who got hit and went down and someone stopped it, he would be standing up like Dominick Cruz. ‘You stopped it too soon!’ Can’t win.”
The UFC will be investigating the Dean-Hardy incident next week, according to UFC senior vice president David Shaw.
“These guys have a job to do, and so we certainly don’t want to disrupt their efforts to do an excellent job, as we expect they always will. So we’ll go back, we’ll check it out, try to get a better understanding of what happened and really take it from there. I guess the bottom line is there’s one group of people that are able to talk to officials during the fight night, and that’s (Marc) Ratner’s regulatory group, and no one else. So we’ll see what happens next week when we get back to the office.”