John McCarthy Says Different Rules For Different MMA Commissions Isn’t Fair To Anyone

In an interview with MMA Junkie, referee “Big” John McCarthy spoke about the rules from various MMA commissions, stating that different rules from different commissions aren’t fair to fighters, officials or fans. Here are highlights:

On the different rule interpretations: “You look at the NFL – the NFL is a business where no matter if they go to New York or Wisconsin in Green Bay, they go down to Dallas or San Francisco, they are an organization that runs the officials, that runs the sport of football for professionals. With that, they have rules committees that meet every year – they go about coming up with new rules they think are going to benefit the sport, the participants, try to make things better for the fans and knowing what should be done in a certain situation. The problem with MMA is, we have all of these athletic commissions, and each athletic commission is an entity unto itself. The athletic commission can do what it wants, and that’s the problem we have with MMA. It’s not fair to the fighters, it’s not fair to the officials, it’s not fair to the fans.”

On what the fans think about the rule changes: “They care that they’re seeing the sport that they like and they know exactly what is allowed in that sport and what is not. But when it changes from state to state, that causes a problem for the fans because fans don’t know what can be done. They don’t know what’s right.”

On how it affects fighters: “It’s a problem for fighters because fighters travel. The low-level fighters are fighting in their state, and they’ll fight multiple times in their state, so they get used to that rule set. But if you’re a top-level fighter and you do one show in California and it’s under the Unifed Rules of MMA, and then you go to Missouri and they say, ‘Oh, we have a different set of rules,’ you just affected that fighter in a bad way. You should care about that, but that’s not what’s happening.”