Former veteran referee Big John McCarthy believes that referee Jason Herzog made the right call by deducting one point from Deiveson Figueiredo in the UFC 256 main event.
At UFC 256, Deiveson Figueiredo was able to successfully retain his flyweight title against Brandon Moreno, but he was unable to have his hand raised. This is because the fight ended in a majority draw. But had Figueiredo not had a point deducted by referee Jason Herzog, he would have been deemed the winner of the bout. The decision to deduct a point came following a pair of fouls by Figueiredo: first, an accidental eye poke while attempting to get back up to his feet followed by a gruesome low-blow kick to Moreno that was so bad that it was questionable if the fight would even continue. If it were John McCarthy officiating the fight instead of Herzog, he would have done the same thing.
“That point deduction is absolutely the way it’s supposed to be done,” McCarthy said on his “Weighing In podcast.” “A lot of people say, ‘That was the first groin strike.’ It doesn’t matter. Did it alter Brandon Moreno and make it to where Figueiredo actually had an advantage based upon a foul? Yeah. You want to get kicked in the nuts? We’ll give you a point.”
Though there was not a repeat of the same foul twice, the low blow was certainly on the higher spectrum of severity and there was more than one foul overall. All things considered, the fight was beginning to spiral out of control but at the expense of only one fighter, so McCarthy believes Herzog did what was needed to balance things out.
“It sucks, and so when he takes the point, what he’s doing is he’s trying to even that playing field back out. Figueiredo has got an advantage doing something that was illegal. I’m going to try evening it out. My only way of evening this out in this situation is to take a point. It’s what he did, and it was the right call.”
Do you agree with John McCarthy? Did Jason Herzog make the right call by deducting a point from Deiveson Figueiredo in the UFC 256 main event?
