Dana White has his own viewpoint on how the UFC 247 headliner should have been scored, but he’s also well aware that his opinion doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Jon Jones retained his light heavyweight crown with a unanimous decision triumph over Dominick Reyes in an enthralling main event at the Toyota Center in Houston on Saturday night. Reyes gave Jones his most difficult test since his first bout with Alexander Gustafsson in 2013, and many observers felt “The Devastator” did enough to win on the basis of a strong first 15 minutes. Case in point: 14 of the 21 unofficial media scorecards tracked by MMADecisions.com awarded the contest to Reyes.
While White may have agreed with that majority, he also wasn’t calling Jones’ triumph a robbery.
“The scoring was all over the map…Going into the last round I had Dominick Reyes 3-1,” White said at the post-fight press conference. “It’s not like there’s this landslide of people saying this was a robbery. People have it all over the place. But the reality is: Who gives a s–t? None of us are judges. The judges called the fight and that’s that.
“As far as the judging and the reffing tonight, do I think it was perfect? I do not. I think that we need to do some work down here.”
Jones vs. Reyes wasn’t the only questionable verdict rendered in Houston on Saturday night. White believes the promotion must work with various athletic commissions to improve the judging in an area. Still, he points out that the UFC 247 headliner was a fight that brought out a variety of perspectives.
“We can work with these guys. The powers that be in the commission have to realize that there were mistakes made. No commission is perfect, no state is perfect. It’s something we have to work on,” White said. “In the Reyes fight it (scoring) was all over the map. I talked with a few guys who were like, ‘You can’t run the last two rounds and take the title away from the champion.’ So you have people that think a lot of different ways in how they score a fight. But we’re not judges.”
White is open to a rematch between the two light heavyweights, but the landscape is constantly changing in the UFC, so nothing is for certain.
“Coming into this fight is the only problem with this fight is the general public doesn’t realize how dangerous this guy [Reyes] really is and what a huge threat he is to Jon Jones,” White said. “Do I think he deserves a rematch? Sure, he does. But we’ll see what happens.”