Saturday's UFC Fight Night 84 main event between Michael Bisping and Anderson Silva contained a lot of strange moments.
Several of those strange moments occurred in rapid succession at the end of the third round. Bisping lost his mouthpiece during an exchange and motioned for referee Herb Dean to pause the action so he could put it back in. Dean, however, did not stop the action, and Silva capitalized by landing a flying knee that appeared to knock Bisping out just as the horn sounded to end the round.
This prompted Silva to begin celebrating in the cage. There was just one problem: Dean never stopped the contest.
Speaking Monday with broadcaster Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour (h/t Chuck Mindenhall of MMA Fighting), Dean discussed the strange sequence as well as his own decisions during it:
[Bisping] signaled once, and Anderson was actually in the process of attacking him. For a lot of reasons that are pretty evident you can't stop to replace the mouthpiece during a heated exchange, and that qualified as a heated exchange. If we were doing that, we'd have guys getting their bell rung, spitting out the mouthpiece to get a little extra time or sometimes you're feeling a little tired, just spit your mouthpiece out. So obviously we can't do that in the middle of an exchange.
Dean also explained his decision not to call a stop to the fight after Silva's flying knee:
Well, [Silva] hit him with the knee and dropped him, and then he walked off and started to celebrate. He had been dropped, but you know, in MMA we don't stop the match just because someone gets dropped. I saw that when he fell he was not unconscious. ... Anderson didn't give him a threat to protect himself from, but—I don't want to start playing what if, what if he attacked and whatnot—the bottom line is he didn't attack.
The referee's decision-making proved pivotal. Bisping was leading on the scorecards after three rounds, and though he took a ton of punishment down the stretch that left him a bloody mess, the Englishman emerged with the unanimous-decision victory.
It was the third consecutive win for the 37-year-old Bisping, and he certainly appears to have more fights left in him. The future is a little murkier for the 40-year-old Silva, who is one of the greatest fighters ever but has fought only twice in the past two years. What's more, the last win on his record came in 2012.
