Officiating MMA might be the toughest officiating job in any sport. Imagine this: One person is absolutely dominating the other one, yet the second person is still defending him or herself. Do you step in? Do you stop the fight? The truth is that there is a code of rules that all officials must follow. Though, all officials can have a different interpretation of the rules.

Herb Dean, “Big” John McCarthy , Mark Goddard and Mario Yamasaki are officials we have all heard of. All of them interpret the rules a little differently. Dean may stop a fight sooner or later than McCarthy stops a fight. You can look at any point in a fight and a certain referee might be more lenient than others on certain things.

The Inside Job: Officiating MMA

Lets talk about submissions and knockouts. Submissions are easy. Every official is told to stop the fight when the fighter taps, whether that’s by visual tap or verbal tap. Knockouts and TKO’s are where the controversy typically comes in. Technically, an official is told to stop the fight once a fighter stops defending him or herself. However, the question is painfully obvious–how do you tell when a fighter has stopped defending themselves?

Typically, defending yourself is defined loosely as moving your body to avoid being hit and/or using your hands to try and defend. However if an official still feels you are taking damage, they can, and will, stop the fight. Some officials may try and give the person who is getting “tagged” a little more time to try and defend.

The Cage

Now let’s move on to grabbing/holding of the cage. The rule is simple; you cannot hold onto the cage as that gives an unfair advantage to a fighter to gain leverage on their opponent. Typically you can hear an official say, “Don’t grab the cage” even watching it on a TV. That will typically be their one warning. Some officials may even give two warnings (I’ve seen it once). However, as we just saw at UFC Chicago last week, during the fight between Kamaru Usman and Alexander Yakolev, McCarthy did not even give Yakolev a warning. The fence grab was so blatant that he immediately paused the fight and deducted a point. Again, this all has to do with the certain officials interpretation of the rules.

Stalling

Let’s take a look at the rule about stalling. This rule is there to keep fighters from running out the clock. Often you can hear officials say, “stay busy” or “keep moving or I will stand you up.” This rule means that you need to be making attempts to improve your position on the ground or in the clinch. That also can be interpreted as you are trying to go for submissions, or improve your position to where you can be successful to throw strikes. You often will hear booing from the crowd if they feel like someone may be staying on the ground too long, and not improving their position. My point with this rule is that it’s just like all the others. It’s interpreted differently depending on who the official is. Herb Dean has been known to be a bit more lenient with this rule than other officials.

The Full Rules

There are other rules that are interpreted differently like eye pokes and kicks below the belt. However, you typically have the same protocol with those; one warning than a one-point deduction.

There is no question that being an official in any sport is difficult. Because rules are often up for interpretation. Yet when you have so many different rules in MMA, each official will have their own interpretation of the rule.

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