Herb Dean is one of the most familiar faces of MMA refereeing. Dean has been in the business for close to 20 years. (He made his debut in 2004.)
Dean is 2–3 in professional MMA with one win coming via submission and the other via technical knockout.
He was active from 2001 until 2007. Dean is also somewhat internet famous for his late reactions.
Dean is also often criticized for his late reactions and some peculiar choices. Notably, he let Brian Ortega keep competing against Volkanovski despite his inability to correctly identify how many fingers he was seeing.
However recently, Dean went viral for another reason. He was caught flirting during a stream of UFC Vegas 63 while an athlete was going through his check ahead of his bout.
This was a particularly hot topic considering the absolute lack of star power on UFC Vegas 63 – and that anticlimactic ending with Kattar shredding his ACL.
Some of the fans had funny takes attached to the clip including one who claimed “In his defense she might have been going for a fence grab right before the video started.”
There were also several reactions from the MMA community.
Lmao Herbal Dean
— Derek Brunson (@DerekBrunson) October 30, 2022
You a snitch bro
— Anatomy of a Fighter (@WillHarrisAOAF) October 30, 2022
Prior to this clip Herb Dean was in hot water for failing to penalize Kamaru Usman’s repeated fence grabs – while he punished Leon Edwards for a single one.
“Well, so fence crabs are, are very difficult thing to deal with in sport because it’s a natural reaction. And people, you know, it’s gonna happen, but to deduct a point… So let’s take a look at what a point deduction means in the sport. What does it point deduction mean?”
“So when you take a point, that means you’ve taken a win. So it’s not like in other sports where you have 12 rounds, and you take a point it’s a much stiffer punishment and the majority of fights that happen when you take a point you’ve taken win and so to have that balance there that point that grab might be needs to significantly affect the fight and and it doesn’t always have to happen right away and so that’s those things are judgment calls with the referee.”