by Godwin1984 » 19. Jan 2009, 05:16
As an equal party to both Mir and Nogueira I've got to say that Mir dominated Nogueira the entire fight. I feel that the stop of the fight was 100% justified. He was not intelligently defending himself (which is the #1 thing the ref. looks for) , he had been knocked down multiple times prior and hardly answered back, and did you see the way he was stumbling when he was trying to get up? Herb Deen did an excellent job at monitoring Nogueira.
You have got to protect the interest of the company and the fighters especially. This isn't UFC 1 where you've got a guy with a purple belt in Karate vs a Greco Roman Wrestler. The MMA fighters of today are Royce Gracie, Dan Severn, Ken Shamrock and Tank Abbot combined into one solid fighter. You cannot expect someone to lay there with their hands down taking blow after blow from someone of this caliber.
The only thing that would have amounted from Herb not stopping the fight when he did would have been Nogueira going into a seizure and possibly a sever injury on top of that.
There is a reason that Dana White and the rest of the owners of UFC implemented rules other than no biting, eye gouging and tickling.. because the sport was too violent. People were getting hurt, the typical fight fan wasn't interested and the company was not growing. Now with a safe set of rules and a solid reality television show on one of the most popular channels of today the industry is nearing mainstream which would never had happened if they didn't make a drastic change.