Dan Miragliotta blew it Saturday night, and the most famous referee in the history of this sport just said so on a microphone.
Big John McCarthy went after Miragliotta’s second-round stand-up in the UFC Fight Night 292 main event on Monday’s episode of Weighing In, the podcast he hosts with former fighter Josh Thomson. His verdict was that Miragliotta gave Tom Nolan an advantage he never earned and took one away from Renato Moicano that he very much did. McCarthy is right, and it isn’t close.
Here’s how it went down at the Meta APEX. Moicano spent most of the first round taking Nolan down and climbing onto his back. In the second, he got right back there, locked a body triangle and started cycling between ground strikes and angles for the rear-naked choke. That choke is his signature, with nearly a dozen finishes on his record. The action slowed for roughly eight seconds. Miragliotta stood them up.
Moments later, Nolan hurt Moicano and ended the round with all the momentum. In the third, he kept the pressure on and finished Moicano with punches for the TKO. Nolan is now 12-1 overall, 6-1 in the UFC, and has won six straight. Moicano, a former lightweight title challenger, fell to 13-8 in the UFC.
Eight Seconds
Eight seconds is how long a bull rider has to hang on. It’s a bizarre threshold for ripping a submission specialist out of a body triangle in a main event.
McCarthy’s read on Miragliotta’s thinking was generous. He figured Miragliotta looked at how much of the fight had been spent in that exact spot, decided nothing was happening and wanted to get some action going. Then McCarthy explained why that logic falls apart.
“Moicano earned that position. He worked for that position.”
McCarthy added that the spot is hard to reach, and once Moicano gets there, it belongs to him. That’s the whole case. Back control with a body triangle is about as close to a deed of ownership as this sport hands out. Pulling a guy out of it is like a Monopoly banker confiscating your hotels on Boardwalk because the table got restless.
And Moicano wasn’t lying on top of Nolan like a weighted blanket, either. McCarthy pointed to the tape.
“If you go back and look, the last minute he was on Nolan’s back before the stand-up, he had to have thrown 20, 25 strikes. Why is he doing that?”
His answer was that Moicano was hunting for the shot that would make Nolan panic, open his neck and let the choke slide in. That’s what a grappler is supposed to do from the back. Twenty-plus strikes in a minute is a man doing his job.
The Boos
The theory floating around since Saturday is that the APEX crowd booing Moicano’s position got into the referee’s head. To be clear, that’s speculation, and Miragliotta hasn’t confirmed any of it. If that’s what happened, it’s worse than a simple misread.
A referee has a short job description. Keep the fighters safe, enforce the rules, and stay out of the way of whoever is winning. Reading the room isn’t on there. The crowd doesn’t get a vote on how a fight is won, and the moment a ref starts treating boos like a stalling warning, every grappler on the roster is fighting with an asterisk.
McCarthy put it better than anybody has.
“(A referee) cannot make a bad fight good, but you can definitely make a good fight bad,” he said.
He was careful to say the fight itself was exciting because of what Nolan did to finish it. His issue was that Nolan got to skip a problem he should have had to solve with his own skills. If Nolan can’t get out of a body triangle on his own, that’s information about Tom Nolan. The stand-up erased it.
“We don’t give advantages to one fighter over another,” McCarthy said.
To be fair to Miragliotta, McCarthy also said, “I know Dan was not trying to be unfair.” I believe that. Miragliotta is one of the biggest names in officiating, and nobody thinks he walked into the APEX with an agenda. Intent doesn’t fix the result, though. A fair fight became an unfair one for one guy, and it happened on a judgment call nobody asked for.
Credit Where It’s Due
None of this is Nolan’s fault. He got handed an opening and he ran through it, hurting Moicano almost immediately and closing the show in the third. That’s a killer’s instinct, and six straight wins don’t happen by accident.
But the question everybody keeps asking is the right one. Does Nolan ever get to land those shots if Moicano keeps that body triangle for the rest of the round? Moicano didn’t even complain much in the moment. The broadcast team did it for him, and so did basically everyone watching at home.
Nolan walks away 12-1 and riding a six-fight streak. Moicano walks away with his third loss in four fights, a title shot less than two years in the rearview, and a rear-naked choke he never got to finish.
