Best and Worst from UFC: Ultimate Fighter 28 Finale

#1 Worst: Yves Lavigne’s gaffe causes Benavidez to get two finishes

A refereeing gaffe basically forced Joseph Benavidez to finish Alex Perez twice

Refereeing gaffes are thankfully rare in the UFC these days, but we got a classic one from Yves Lavigne last night, bad enough to cause Joseph Benavidez to essentially have to finish opponent Alex Perez twice. Quite what the Canadian official was thinking, I simply don’t know.

Midway through the first round, Perez went for a takedown, only for Benavidez to stuff it and begin landing solid punches to the side of the head. It looked like Perez was done – he certainly stopped defending himself – and Lavigne appeared to stop the fight, placing his hands on Benavidez, only to pull back when Perez suddenly went for a single leg takedown.

Naturally, Benavidez had already stopped his attack and suddenly had to switch up to defend the takedown. A few moments later, pretty much the same sequence happened and this time Lavigne stopped the fight for real.

It didn’t really affect Benavidez in the end – he cracked a joke about it post-fight – but it certainly would’ve had an effect on poor Perez, who essentially got TKO’d twice. And can you imagine the controversy had Perez actually come back to win? I’m not suggesting refereeing in MMA is easy, but an experienced ref like Lavigne should know when to step in and not flip-flop like that. This was a horrendous mistake.