Veteran ref Herb Dean has revealed that plans are in the works to try to combat the issue of eye-pokes in MMA.

Dean said on Michael BIsping’s podcast that the idea was to be more pro-active in enforcing a current rule that makes extending your fingers towards an opponent’s eye a foul.

This comes after several high-profile fighters spoke out about the problem, insisting that only punishing fighters after an eye-poke occurs wasn’t enough to stamp out the problem.

“So far, what we’re talking about is, we’ve made rules,” Dean said on Michael Bisping’s ‘Believe You Me’ podcast. “So we made a rule it’s a foul to extend the fingers towards the eyes. That’s the rule we’ve already had in place. So that rule has been there, but we haven’t been enforcing it. So we’re going to move forward on that.

“I think people would not have been used to seeing someone get a point taken, because most of the time when we take a point, it’s more of a reactive to the damaging and the unbalancing of the fight that’s been done by a foul, and that’s the only way we can think to balance it. But this right here is a dangerous foul and somebody’s going to keep doing a dangerous action. We should start taking points by them doing that action before it actually happens to hurt somebody.“

Dean went on to point out that point-deductions like this could become problematic from a scoring perspective, and so he revealed that discussions are also underway to potentially revamp the way fights are scored, though he didn’t go into details about what that might entail.

“The other thing about MMA is, I mean, we have a one-point sport. The majority of three-round fights, what’s the score? 29-28. So you take one point, you’ve taken a majority of wins and turned it into a draw. But we’re going to have to do something, so that’s one of the things we’ve thought about that we’re going to be doing. That’s something that’s going to happen.”