It hasn’t been a very good few weeks for longtime MMA referee Herb Dean.
Dean took a lot of heat from two-division champion Alex Pereira after the referee allowed Ciryl Gane to get away with a few shots to the back of the head during their UFC White House title fight. A week later, Andre Fili was finished by a tomahawk elbow to the back of the head at a UFC Apex event. Once gain, referee Herb Dean let it slide.
Now we have a third event where Herb Dean’s refereeing is in question. Shara “Bullet” Magomedov spent a decent amount of time at UFC Baku pulling Michel Pereira’s hair. “Bullet” was warned repeatedly by Dean, but no points were taken for this repeated fouling, not even when Magomedov followed things up with an eye poke.
Alex Pereira, never one to pass up on an opportunity to bury Herb Dean these days, was pretty straight forward with what he thought of the refereeing.
“Herb Dean, coward,” Pereira wrote on Instagram, following it up with a petition to have Dean banned reffing UFC fight.
Tom Aspinall also knows a thing or two about getting fouled repeatedly with no punishment being issued. He’s been on the sidelines since October 2025 after Ciryl Gane double-eye poked him during their title fight.
“MMA doesn’t have ‘rules’ anymore,” he wrote over video of Pereira vs. Magomedov. “It’s just ‘suggestions.’”
These kinds of debates over non-calls have been going on for years, but there’s some hope that maybe things will change in the near future. The referees themselves have been talking about how they need to take more points for fouls, and how their passivity has led to a situation where dirty fighters get three to five free fouls per fight with no consequence at all.
Of course, it means you have to hope you get a no nonsense referee willing to enforce the rules. Alex Pereira clearly believes that isn’t Herb Dean. It’s not a lot of the other top guys these days either. And if we had a stickler for the rules, would we be seeing complaints after he docks points and changes the outcomes of fights? Probably. But maybe, just maybe, rules should be enforced.
