Dustin Poirier has reacted to his teammate Renato Moicano’s recent loss.

Fans weren’t happy with this past weekend’s UFC main event due to the referee intervening in the second round.

Dan Miragliotta chose to stand up Moicano and Tom Nolan due to a lack of activity despite the Brazilian having his opponent’s back.

‘The Diamond’ believes that a way to stop this from happening inside the Octagon in the future would be to introduce a card system.

Dustin Poirier says UFC should implement a yellow card system to avoid referee standups

Dustin Poirier suggested that the UFC should allow referees to hand out yellow cards for inactivity when reflecting on this past weekend’s lightweight main event.

“Bring back the yellow card,” he said on UFC’s Deep Waters. “10% of the purse. The referee doesn’t have to get involved and stop [the fight].”

While Joe Rogan has pushed for the removal of all standups, the card system would financially motivate fighters to not stall in grappling positions.

Despite pitching this idea, Poirier did also make the case that neither Renato Moicano or Tom Nolan were stalling in this fight before the standup, saying, “It’s just high-level fighting”.

This would still potentially create an issue where a referee may not need to take a position away from a fighter, but the official would still have to judge what is worthy of handing out a card.

For example, many would assume that in the case of Moicano, he was still showing effective grappling without landing damage or threatening a submission so wouldn’t justify a card.

Promotions like PRIDE and ONE Championship both used a card system, with three yellow cards in one bout resulting in a fighter being disqualified.

This happened to former UFC fighter Arjan Bhullar in 2024, when he suffered a disqualification loss in ONE Championship for “timidity” due to not engaging with his opponent.

In PRIDE, any fines that were handed out via the cards, which helped to stop their ten-minute opening rounds from featuring a lot of stalling, went to the promotion.

Given the current debate regarding fighter pay, it seems unlikely that fans would be on board with a rule change that could take money off the athletes and give it back to the UFC.

UFC Vegas 123’s standup may have been more costly for Renato Moicano than a yellow card

Most fans and fighters seem to agree that Renato Moicano should have never been stood up in the first place due to him being in a dominant position.

After winning the majority of the second round with his grappling, the Brazilian was hurt by his opponent’s strikes when being forced to stand with him again.

The idea of the yellow card system would be to motivate Moicano to land more damage from that position, despite it already being a dominant one, with the risk of a fine.

Moicano ended up losing half of his purse due to the UFC’s show/win pay structure anyway after being on his way to winning the first two rounds before the standup came.