Mike Rodriguez appeared to be cheated out of a second round TKO stoppage against Ed Herman on Saturday night at UFC Fight Night 177 when the referee mistakenly believed he’d landed an illegal knee to the groin rather than to the body.
Naturally, Herman played along as if he’d been hit in the groin to give himself time to recover and then made Rodriguez’s night even worse when he went on to submit him with a kimura in the third round.
Afterwards Dana White was livid with the referee, Chris Tognoni for the botched groin strike call, but Rodriguez himself appears to be in a much more forgiving mood when it comes to both the official and Herman.
“It’s a lot to take in,” Rodriguez admitted to MMAJunkie. “I’ve got no ill will towards (Tognoni). It was a simple mistake, and Ed just capitalized on the mistake. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a (expletive) situation. The only thing I really, like, blame Ed for, if anything, is when he got the submission, how he put his feet in the fence. Other than that, it is what it is. There’s nothing we can really do about it.”
Making things a little easier for Rodriguez is the fact that White ensured he still got his win bonus despite his defeat, and that UFC brass have informed him that they will essentially move forward as if he did in fact emerge victorious.
“I was sitting in the back, I was a little bummed out, I got caught. The doctors were looking at my shoulder and all of a sudden I looked up and Dana White was right there,” Rodriguez recalls. “He was not happy. I thought I did something wrong. I was instantly like, ‘Oh (expletive), what did I do?’ He was like, ‘That’s bull(expletive), that’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. You definitely won.’”
As such, Rodriguez is happy to put the controversy behind him and set his sights on what comes next.
“If they’re looking at it as a win for me, I’ll just move on. I don’t work for the commission, I work for the UFC. So, let’s keep running it. They think it’s a win? Let’s keep going. Who else is next? Who else is out there?”
