UFC President Dana White is stating that Masvidal will not be punished for the post-show brawl, as White is instead casting blame onto the UFC staff for what went down.
“I do blame my staff. There’s never a scenario where you let guys walk up to each other like that backstage,” White told Yahoo! Sports (via Damon Martin of MMA News). “We have enough people backstage that, that shouldn’t happen, including security. I’m super disappointed in my whole crew for that one. These guys are fighters, they’re in the heat of the moment, he just won, he’s got the adrenaline pumping and [Leon Edwards] comes by plus Masvidal is ‘that guy’. For anybody backstage in my staff to let these guys walk up to each other is just ridiculous. As soon as he walked up the stage with his hands behind his back, 10 people from the UFC should have jumped in there. That stuff shouldn’t happen.”
Edwards also declined to press any charges against Masvidal, but instead wants to settle things with the fighter inside of the Octagon.
White also states that situations like the post-show brawl happen in the fight business.
“It’s the fight business. Sometimes people overreact,” White said. “I thought a lot of people overreacted on the Conor [McGregor] and Khabib [Nurmagomedov] thing. We had that thing contained like that, we knew that was a possibility that could happen and we were ready for it. These things happen. It’s the fight business and our job is to make sure these things don’t happen on stage, behind the scenes, but sometimes it does. Sometimes things escalate and blow up.”
