Mike Rodriguez suffered a controversial third round submission loss to Ed Herman at UFC Fight Night: Waterson vs. Hill.
The reason behind the controversy was that referee Chris Tognoni errantly stopped the bout when he thought Rodriguez landed a low blow on Herman, when if fact, it was a clean knee strike to the midsection that had landed. Herman would then recover and score the aforementioned third round submission win over Rodriguez.
Tyson Chartier is Rodriguez’s manager/coach and he told MMA Junkie that the Nevada Athletic Commission (NAC) rejected Rodriguez’s appeal to have the fight result overturned to a no contest.
“So they did exactly what we thought they’d do: They hid behind the whole ‘the referee is the sole arbiter of the fight, he didn’t choose to use replay, that’s on him, there’s nothing we can do,’ so we pushed back,” Chartier said. “I couldn’t take no for an answer for this. I think commissions, in general, they have no accountability, not a lot of oversight, and they can hide behind different rules because other ones write them, and ultimately we’re appealing to them anyway. But I think we just gotta keep pushing and be heard at a hearing and let our voices be heard and explain that, listen, there are better ways to handle this stuff. Like, if someone who’s never watched a fight can come into that room and watch the Mike Rodriguez incident, they’d be like, ‘That’s wrong.’ Let’s just apply common sense. This isn’t politics. No one’s trying to screw anybody over. Let’s just apply common sense so what happened to Mike is wrong, he should never have to look at that as an L on his record.”
Rodriguez will now move on and fight Danilo Marques on February 6 at UFC Fight Night: Overeem vs. Volkov.
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