Alright, alright; for the record I think the stoppage last night between Barnett and Mir was fine, but apparently Mir, Dana White and others don’t feel the same. I collected their thoughts below from the post fight scrums/tweets etc, and will put the .gif in for you guys to decide.
The .gif is provided by Zprophet, of course.
Dana on the Twitter:
“F—ing ridiculous stoppage!!!!” “The guys with experience make mistakes. That guy had no business being in the Co Main event!”
Then Mir:
“Obviously I thought it was a bad stoppage,” “We’re fighters. If every fight was stopped on any kind of a flash shot or anything like that — actually, I took the knee, and I remember going, ‘s— I’m in a bad position.’ And that’s why I dropped my other knee out from underneath me so that could fall to the ground and make sure I didn’t take a second one. I didn’t belly out, I didn’t flatten out, and I actually tried to re-dig my underhook so that i could get a single. And I actually looked at the referee stopping it.
“And then at first I thought, maybe I was out? Did I take a bunch of shots that didn’t see? And then after watching it, I was conscious the whole time. Even when I stood up I wasn’t wobbled, I was completely coherent. So at best your argument is it was a flash knock down. I didn’t know fights stopped on that. If that was the case I never would have beaten [Antonio Rodrigo] Nogueira, I don’t think we would have seen Travis Browne knock out [Alistair] Overeem last week. There are too many fights in our sport that are exciting, and you’ve got to let us fight. I didn’t sign up for a tennis match. It’s nothing against Josh, he’s a great fighter and he did what he had to do.”
“I think the fans got robbed. I got screwed over. The fact that I trained so hard for that fight to keep up a pace that I knew I could have driven hard through for three rounds. Say what you will about Jackson’s camp and game planning, everybody comes in shape. I showed up in shape on the scale, I showed up in shape out there, with my motivation — it sucks to do everything right and just have the door shut on you.”
Seems to me if your thought process is: “was I out?” You were probably out. But hey, I think I’m wrong, because even Barnett thinks it was early, though I suspect he just wanted to beat on Mir more:
“I actually do feel that it was an early stoppage, I would always prefer to get the clean finish.”