Fighters spend their whole careers getting graded by judges, oddsmakers and loudmouths like me. Dominick Reyes grabbed the clipboard and flipped it around, and I am fully on board.
After he knocked out Azamat Murzakanov at UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi on Saturday, Reyes went after Daniel Cormier on social media, accused him of bias in how he called the fight and labeled him “a low IQ hater.” Cormier tried to cool things off. Reyes went the other way. According to MMA Fighting, the back and forth apparently inspired him to start a YouTube series called The Commentary Scorecard, and episode one is a film session where the film is Cormier’s own broadcast.
The final grades: Jon Anik pulled a B, B-plus. Paul Felder got an A. Cormier got an F-plus, which might be the most passive-aggressive grade ever handed out. That plus is working overtime. It’s the teacher asking you to stay after class and then drawing a little smiley face on your test.
View post on X
My verdict: Reyes wins this on the tape. He’s sharpest on the research points, he’s genuinely right about the referee, and the only place he stumbles is when he trades the breakdown for name-calling.
The homework points land
Start with the stance. Reyes says Cormier told viewers Murzakanov had switched to southpaw right away. Reyes’ rebuttal is short and brutal: Murzakanov is a natural southpaw who, by Reyes’ account, fights that way every single time and never goes orthodox. Treating that as a tactical adjustment is like being shocked when Vin Diesel brings up family in a Fast & Furious movie. That’s just what he does. Reyes chalked it up to no research or just talking, and he marked it as the first minus.
Then there’s the comeback framing. Cormier said on the broadcast, “Everyone wrote this kid off. Went a little bit on a losing streak, was not fighting well, now he’s back fighting the best ranked fighters in the world.” Reyes’ problem is the idea that he’s only now getting back to the top guys. He says he has fought only ranked opponents since the skid started.
To be fair to DC, that line was mostly a compliment. But the details matter here because the real story is better than the one he told. Reyes dropped four straight, two of them title fights. With Saturday’s knockout he’s won two in a row and five of his last six. If he really did that without ever getting a soft rebuild fight, that’s a guy who climbed back up the mountain without taking the ski lift, and the broadcast undersold it.
The Beltran point is his best one
Here’s how the finish went: Reyes wobbled Murzakanov with a head kick, dropped him with a left hand, hesitated for a beat, then followed up with punches to close it. Over that, Cormier cracked, “Mike Beltran could have stopped the fight at any moment but he just wanted to see murder.”
Reyes didn’t laugh. He brought up Herb Dean, who Reyes says gets booed wherever he goes and harassed on the street, and argued that booth jokes like that build a reputation a referee can’t shake. Then he backed Beltran outright, pointing out that this was a ranked fight between the seventh- and eighth-ranked guys in the division: “So this is a high-stakes fight and Beltran is just giving us an opportunity to fight and not stop the fight early, so I do commend Beltran for not stopping it early.”
This is the part that sold me. Refs don’t get a microphone to answer back. A one-liner from the booth gets clipped and reposted for years. And the guy defending Beltran is the guy who was throwing the punches, a fighter who hesitated himself before finishing. He has zero reason to cheerlead for extra damage, and he still thinks the ref got it right.
Where he overreaches
The blood clots gripe is the weakest entry. Reyes was annoyed that Anik’s first mention of him was his 2022 blood clots, which he called a dead horse. I’d push back a little, since a casual viewer flipping over from football might not know that history. His underlying point holds, though. He says he’d already landed multiple leg kicks and was moving well on the outside while the booth was still talking only about Murzakanov. That’s a fair airtime complaint, and it’s telling that Anik still walked away with a B. Even Reyes knows that one’s a misdemeanor.
Then there’s the bias accusation. Reyes said it doesn’t matter if a commentator trained or worked with a guy, you have to stay unbiased. He didn’t spell out who he meant in the comments MMA Fighting published, so I’m not going to fill in that blank for him. What I will say is the “low IQ hater” shot was beneath the rest of his case. The YouTube breakdown, with timestamps and specific quotes, is a hundred times more damaging than an insult, because you can’t shrug off receipts.
If Cormier wants that grade bumped above an F-plus, the fix is the boring one Reyes already laid out for him: pull up Murzakanov’s last few fights before the next broadcast and check which foot he leads with.
