If you watch UFC with any sort of regularity you know that there aren't very many rules, but there are a couple of them that are very important because you can kill someone with certain moves. I know it is part of the territory in being a fighter and there have been some fighters that have been knocked out very badly by strikes.
At UFC 249 veteran fighter and now ex-champion Petr Yan committed one of the worst errors in judgement that I have ever seen in UFC fight and honestly, he should have known better. It's not like the guy just started fighting.
You can not use a knee to the head of a downed opponent, ever. It is up to the referee to decide when someone is downed or not but the general rule is that if your opponent is not on his feel, he is considered downed. This wasn't an incidental contact situation that can be excused, Petr meant to do that and while it could just be a moment of bad judgement, a seasoned fighter should know better than to even get the knees involved in a situation like this.
The referee faced some harsh criticism for not immediately calling the fight and even asking Aljamain Sterling if he wanted to continue - which it shouldn't be up to a fighter if he wants to continue when a disqualifying blow was done by their opponent, but I can kind of relate to why he hesitated and brought the doctor into the ring: This is uncharted territory... this was a title fight and in the history of UFC a belt has never changed hands because of a ref's decision. I can relate to his hesitation in calling it at first.
Eventually it was ruled a disqualification and Aljamain Sterling was declared the victor and the new champion.
A teary-eyed Sterling then immediately took off the belt and left it lying on the ground in the octagon. No one wants to win a championship this way but honestly, what else can be done? Yan broke the rules and therefore must be disqualified.
Now here's the flip side of this situation: I think that Sterling was doing a little bit of acting as far as how rattled he was by the blow. As he rolled around on the ground and tried and failed a few times to get back to his feet I couldn't help but think that he was faking the seriousness of his injury a bit. For one thing, he was totally coherent and was having a completely lucid conversation with both the doctor and the ref. I thought that was a little despicable.
However, my, and other people's opinions, such as Dominick Reyes' are irrelevant. Was he capable of continuing the fight? I think that Sterling definitely was capable and probably contemplated, while rolling around on the ground about how he was almost certainly down on points and was going to lose this fight if he insisted he continue. That isn't how the sport works though. It isn't up to the fighters if they want to continue or not if their opponent cheats. Whether or not it was just a bad and stupid mistake on Yan's part doesn't matter either. There are rules for a reason and he definitely meant to knee a downed opponent in the head - and you can't do that.
If you saw the fight you probably noticed that Sterling was swinging wildly throughout all the rounds up to this point. He managed to knock himself to the ground on several occasions. Yan was far more composed and was calculating his strikes while covering up. Sterling had more "significant strikes" but that is a very grey area. The strikes he was throwing were not doing any damage and honestly, I was surprised that Sterling hadn't gassed out sooner than he did.
I honestly believe that if it wasn't for the illegal knee that Yan was definitely going to win the fight either by KO'ing his rapidly slowing opponent or by unanimous decision. Belts rarely change hands on the scorecards for the challenger and generally speaking I agree with this idea: You gotta TAKE the belt, it can't be given to you.
So the real winner in all of this is the UFC because now they get to have another PPV with a rematch and people are going to be a lot more excited to see the rematch than they were about seeing this one. It was the 3rd billed fight in UFC 259, you can be all but guaranteed that it will be the main event in the next one.
One thing is for certain, Yan is not going to make that sort of mistake ever again.