Daniel Cormier is taking a beating online after he questioned Jason Herzog’s stoppage of Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev’s first-round knockout of Nikita Krylov on the UFC 333 prelims. Viewers watched Krylov go down from a knee and stay down, then heard Cormier suggest the referee may have jumped in too early. Bloody Elbow rounded up the reaction on Saturday, and it was rough.
The finish came about halfway through the opening round of a light heavyweight prelim. Yakhyaev timed a big knee, Krylov dropped, and Herzog waved it off. UFC France posted the clip on X and called it a first-round TKO, praising the timing on the knee. Most people who saw it would call it a frightening stoppage, the kind where you’re glad the ref was standing close.
Cormier, a former heavyweight and light heavyweight champion who knows a few things about getting hit at 205 pounds, saw it differently from the commentary desk.
“He went down limp,” Cormier said on the broadcast. “But it seemed like he bounced up decently quick.”
He then raised doubts about whether Herzog made the right call, and that’s where the timeline caught fire. One viewer asked, “What fight was Cormier watching?” Another went straight for the exit sign: “Can we please get Daniel Cormier off the UFC commentary team Always so biased and incredibly wrong about everything.” A chunk of the replies mocked Cormier for what fans see as a soft spot for Russian fighters, a complaint that’s followed him around for a while now. Others pointed out that Krylov was getting hit while lying face down on the canvas, which is usually the part of a fight where the ref’s job gets very easy.
This wasn’t the only UFC 333 result drawing heat. Bloody Elbow also flagged a bout between teammates of Petr Yan and Alexander Volkanovski that ended in its own controversy, so Saturday wasn’t short on arguments.
For Yakhyaev, it’s the best kind of win to have on tape: fast, clean and impossible to argue with unless you’re sitting at the desk. The sources don’t lay out his next fight or where Krylov goes from here, so I won’t pretend they do.
My take, from a guy who usually wants a number before he wants an opinion: there’s no stat that rescues this one. “Went down limp” is the whole argument, and Cormier said it himself before talking his way back out of it. When a fighter goes limp and eats more shots on the floor, the referee has done his job, and Herzog did his. I’ll defend a broadcaster’s right to a bad read, because I’ve cashed in plenty of bad reads of my own at the window. But this one, unlike most bad bets, had the replay sitting right there to settle it, and the replay sided with Herzog.
