Daniel Cormier: Dan Miragliotta deserves a penalty for UFC Vegas 123 blunder
“It is so clear that the mistake led to the change in the outcome that you have to have a penalty.”
Daniel Cormier has had two days to think about it, and his verdict has not softened. The UFC Hall of Famer, who was on commentary for the UFC Vegas 123 main event on Saturday night, calls Dan Miragliotta's second-round stand-up of Renato Moicano one of the biggest referee errors he has ever seen — and he wants the Nevada State Athletic Commission to act.
"I will say, without a shadow of a doubt, with no second thought in my mind, I may have seen, from right next to the octagon, one of the biggest referee errors I've ever seen in my entire life," Cormier said Monday on his YouTube channel. "What I saw on Saturday night was one of the biggest officiating errors I've ever seen in my entire life. And I'm not talking about in the moment. I'm saying this a couple days afterward and sitting on it and thinking on it."
The error was Miragliotta's decision to stand up Moicano and Tom Nolan in round 2 while Moicano had Nolan's back with a body triangle locked in. Nolan rocked Moicano with punches to close out the round, kept the striking going in round 3, and finished the fight by TKO at 1:28 of the third, with punches and elbows at the Meta APEX in Las Vegas.
"Right away I said, 'Oh my God, this is crazy,'" Cormier said. "You cannot take somebody off of someone's back. I don't care what the rule is. What I care about is knowing that it's a dominant position. It is a dominant position. There are positions in fighting that you never change."
Cormier rejected any suggestion that Moicano was stalling. "There was no stalling. He was not being timid. He was actually attempting to try to get to that position," he said, adding that back control is so hard to reach that fighters work their whole careers to get there.
His demand is specific. "Dan Miragliotta needs a reset," Cormier said. "There's a show this weekend at the Apex; Dan Miragliotta should not be there. There is a show in New York City (UFC 334) where the heavyweight title will be on the line; Dan Miragliotta should not be there."
"It is so clear that the mistake led to the change in the outcome that you have to have a penalty," Cormier said. "Everybody else is held accountable. We're all held accountable for our actions. Nobody should be above that, officials included. This is not me just shitting on Dan Miragliotta. This is not me going at anyone; I don't want to do that. But you've got to be held accountable for your actions when they're bad."
Cormier did add one piece of nuance: he believes Nolan was likely to finish the fight anyway, because Moicano was fatigued from "maxing out his effort" on the ground. That does not change his view of the call.
He is far from alone. Kenny Florian ripped the stand-up, John McCarthy said it gave Nolan an unfair advantage, and Moicano said the crowd influenced the decision. Joe Solecki demanded an investigation, Caio Borralho asked why a fighter should be rewarded for not knowing how to escape back control, and Ariel Helwani called it one of the five worst referee stand-ups of all time. Dustin Poirier went further, proposing the return of the yellow-card system to stop referees derailing bouts.
Nolan himself addressed the sequence at the post-event press conference, saying he was talking to Miragliotta about punches to the back of the head, not asking for a stand-up. "I had nothing to do with the ref standing it up. It's not my fault," he said.
Moicano, writing in Portuguese after the fight, thanked the fans and owned his performance. "I had a terrible performance, I was well trained, I managed to get the back control but I couldn't do any damage, he was defending well," he wrote.
