I’m no expert in the art of ref’ing fights but I have to imagine that the ref’s first and foremost concern in an MMA fight is stopping it as soon as possible when someone either taps out, is KO’ed/TKO’ed, submits or is choked out. Failure to do so in a timely enough manner could case serious, permanent injury or possible even death in some cases.
The very LAST thing the UFC wants is for a fighter to DIE or be permanently blinded, suffer brain damage, etc. during one of its fights. The outcry against the sport might then all but shut it down.
So if a fighter who is obviously severely banged up and has so far had the piss all but beaten out of him, with blood all over his face, says to him, “I can’t see,” I’ve got to imagine Herb Dean wasn’t just thinking that that meant he needed to wipe some blood/sweat from his eyes, but possibly that his vision was blurry or foggy from taking some serious shots from Randy.
Brain damage and the like are scary things. Imagine for a second if Gonzaga didn’t have any blood on his face, so blood in the eyes wasn’t an issue. But he had of course taken some shots to the head so far during the course of the fight. Then he says to the ref, “I can’t see.” The possibility of blindness or serious brain damage of some sort from an ill-placed head shot is no small issue.
Herb had to make a split-second decision. He didn’t know what the cause of Gabe’s vision loss was. Could he have handled it better, like some suggested, and just asked him to either tap out or not tap out, without separating them? Probably, but it’s not something he can take lightly.
When Gonzaga first said he couldn’t see, since it didn’t look to me like he had blood in his eyes at all, my first thought was that some of the shots he took to the head might have seriously fucked him up, which is kind of scary.
So I don’t fault Herb Dean too much.
Now, when he stood up CroCop and Gonzaga, THAT was a shitty call.