Joe Rogan didn’t need a podcast mic to make his feelings known about Saturday night. He needed a group text and about nine words.
After Tom Nolan stopped Renato Moicano in the UFC Vegas 123 main event, the conversation was supposed to be about the Australian lightweight extending his winning streak in his first UFC headliner. Instead it was about Dan Miragliotta, who stood the fighters up while Moicano was sitting on Nolan’s back because he decided the Brazilian wasn’t being active enough. Jon Anik revealed on his YouTube channel what Rogan sent to him and Daniel Cormier once the dust settled:
“It’s not a sport if refs can do that.”
That’s harsh. It’s also correct, and I’ll die on this hill next to him.
Back control is the whole point
Think about what back control means in this sport. It’s the position every grappling coach on the planet drills their fighters to chase. You don’t stumble into it. You earn it by scrambling, by chaining attempts together, by making the other guy carry your weight until he cracks. When a referee looks at that, shrugs, decides it isn’t busy enough and orders everybody up, he’s basically handing the bottom fighter a free get-out-of-jail card that he did nothing to earn.
Rogan has been banging this drum for a while. Per Bloody Elbow, he’s floated the idea of scrapping stand-ups entirely, with the logic that if you want to get back to your feet, you should have to fight your way there. That position always sounded a little extreme to me in the abstract. Then you watch a ref pull a guy off the back in a main event and suddenly it sounds like common sense.
Anik, who is usually the diplomat in that booth, didn’t play it safe either. He said a referee should never be able to snatch away a dominant spot like that, no matter how active the guy on top is, and he thinks this mess might actually force a correction.
“I do believe when somebody has back control like that, a referee will not be able to take it away,” Anik said. “Certainly not that expeditiously.”
That word, expeditiously, is doing a lot of work. It’s the play-by-play guy’s polite way of saying the hook came way too fast.
Moicano’s honesty complicates things (a little)
The fun wrinkle is that Moicano himself isn’t screaming robbery. He’s said he won’t appeal the result, and after the fight he was hard on his own performance. He admitted he got to the back but couldn’t do damage from there because Nolan defended well.
Credit to “Money” for that, because a lot of fighters would be filing paperwork and recording a 20-minute Instagram rant by Sunday morning. But his candor doesn’t let Miragliotta off the hook. If anything it makes the argument cleaner.
Yes, Moicano wasn’t landing much. So what? Nolan defending well from bottom is Nolan doing his job. That’s the fight. Two guys battling for wrist control and hooks is a contest, the same way two strikers circling and feinting is a contest. Nobody stands up a kickboxing exchange because the jab count dropped for 30 seconds. The guy on the back is still winning that exchange, positionally and on the scorecard, and the guy on the bottom is still losing it until he escapes. The referee’s job is to keep it safe and keep it legal, and pulling someone out of the best position in grappling isn’t either of those things.
And once you accept the not-active-enough logic, where does it stop? Does mount get reset? Does a body lock against the fence? Every one of those calls lives in one official’s gut, and that’s exactly what Rogan meant. A sport needs rules a fighter can game-plan around. A ref’s mood on a Saturday night in Vegas doesn’t qualify.
Don’t let this eat Nolan’s night
Here’s my one gripe with how this whole thing has played out: Tom Nolan deserves better than being a footnote in a referee controversy. He got his first main event, he kept the streak alive, and he finished a veteran who has been a tough out at lightweight for years. None of that is his fault, and he didn’t ask for the stand-up.
But the UFC can’t keep acting surprised when its own commentators are trashing calls in private texts that end up on YouTube. When the guy who has called more of your fights than anybody alive says the call made it stop being a sport, you don’t wait for the Joe Rogan Experience episode to drop. You fix the stand-up rule before the next Fight Night, and you start with back control being off-limits.
