Cody Brundage isn’t going down without a fight after an accidental head butt led to a stoppage in his fight at UFC Atlanta but ultimately the night ended with a loss on his record rather than a disqualification or a no-contest.
The incident occurred in his fight against Mansur Abdul-Malik this past Saturday night after the middleweights engaged in a wild brawl to kickoff the final round. As the fighters were unloading a barrage of punches, Abdul-Malik dove forward and his head clashed with Brundage and sent him crashing to the canvas.
Abdul-Malik followed up with several more punches before the referee could rush in to stop the fight. Replays showed that a head butt rather than a legal strike put Brundage down but the referee ultimately decided to send the fight to the scorecards, which led to Abdul-Malik winning a technical decision.
“It didn’t even hurt me, it just took my legs,” Brundage told MMA Fighting about the head butt. “It buzzed me a little bit, my legs were gone so I dropped. I was covering up, Mansur’s best ability is to finish a fight when someone’s hurt so when I was underneath, he’s raining down punches and I don’t want to move and make myself vulnerable but I wasn’t hurt. I was definitely there.
“I’m not really quite sure why I wasn’t given five minutes [to recover]. Just a lot of things happened but I was never really out of it. As soon as the fight ends I tell the referee after he pulled the guy off me, I was like it was a head butt. Immediately was protesting, I never went out. It was super frustrating.”
As frustrating as it was that an illegal strike ended the fight, Brundage just didn’t understand how his fight got scored after a similar incident unfolded earlier in the night between Paul Craig and Renato Bellato but that bout was declared a no-contest.
While he doesn’t blame Abdul-Malik for what happened, the result was still the same and yet Brundage is going home with a loss on his record and half his paycheck after only earning his show money from the UFC.
“I don’t think he head butted me intentionally at all,” Brundage said. “I don’t think it’s something someone even looks to do really. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think he did that. I do think the intentionality of fouls in MMA is the most laughable shit that makes our sport less legitimate than other sports. If I’m playing basketball and I foul you, it doesn’t matter whether I meant to foul you or not, you’re going to shoot free throws. If we’re playing football and I foul you, it doesn’t matter if I meant to or not, they are going to enforce the penalty.
“In MMA, more times than not, the penalties are not enforced. It’s funny, they come backstage and the referee [tells us] ‘I’m giving you a warning, this is your one and only warning, I’m giving you a warning now, you go out there and do it, I’m taking a point, I’m enforcing this.’ Well, you’re not. So I don’t even know why we’re having this discussion.”
Referees are often criticized for not penalizing fighters for fouls such as eye pokes, grabbing the cage or low blows. The local commissions also have sway in making the call for these types of stoppages, which is what angers Brundage so much in his situation.
Beyond what happened in the Bellato vs. Craig fight earlier in the night, a perfect example of an almost identical stoppage unfolded back in 2021 when Kyle Daukaus finished Kevin Holland with a submission after they clashed heads during an exchange.
The fight was ultimately ruled a no-contest and that was the end of it.
Brundage doesn’t understand how he’s being penalized for absorbing an illegal strike, the fight gets finished off that foul and yet because everything unfolded in the third round, the judges are then offering up scorecards to determine a result.
“In Georgia’s rules, in their own bi-laws, people will contest some things, they’ll appeal certain decisions based off a judge’s discretion or a referee’s discretion and you’re never going to win an appeal based on someone’s discretion because it’s just their opinion,” Brundage explained. “But it says in the Georgia bi-laws in the way they do MMA there, they will not score unfinished rounds. They scored the third round completely against their bi-laws. So me and my team filed an appeal.
“The foul directly impacted the fight. It wasn’t a foul that didn’t have much impact. It ended the fight and then to score a 30 second round is just insane to me. I don’t really understand it. Another thing is there’s no uniform why how they handle this stuff. They’re just doing shit on the fly. That again, just brings less legitimacy to our sport.”
As much as it upsets him that a foul ended his night, Brundage also doesn’t see how the judges gave Abdul-Malik the win, especially after going home and rewatching the fight.
“When the judges’ scores come back and it’s 30-27, I think that’s laughable,” Brundage said. “I think whoever that judge is should be fired. You’re playing with so much money. Those guys are going to make their paycheck no matter what. I’m going home with half my paycheck because that guy doesn’t know what he’s watching.”
Brundage also took exception to a few things that Abdul-Malik said after the fight, although he wants to give him the benefit of the doubt because the former Contender Series winner may not have had all the information available to him when he spoke about the fight.
“After the fight, he’s a young kid, he seems like a really good kid, he comes from a good team — I don’t want to hate on him or talk too much trash on him,” Brundage said. “But I saw his post fight interview that he did and he’s like ‘there was no significant head clash, there wasn’t enough space for there to be damage on a head clash, it was the knee. I kneed him to the body. That’s what hurt him.’ I don’t know if he has people telling him that. I don’t know what the justification was for why he said that post-fight but it’s laughable. It’s completely laughable.
“You watch the fight, he completely misses with the knee. He jumps from where the sponsors are on the cage, jumps with the knee, out of control, off balance, and drops his hands to his waist … I’ve never seem someone throw a knee, drop their hands to their waist, go head over dick into someone’s face. It was a bad head clash. I was there, I wasn’t unconscious but fighters know sometimes you get hit and your knees go jelly. So I dropped, obviously the ref stops the fight. It’s super unfortunate.”
Appeals rarely get approved when it comes to state athletic commissions overturning a result but Brundage hopes the powers-that-be in Georgia at least take a good long look at everything that unfolded in his fight.
Regardless, Brundage admits the entire experience fighting in Atlanta was a little off-putting and he’s not sure he’d rush to compete there again if offered an opportunity.
“The Georgia commission, the whole week it was odd,” Brundage said. “If you could have seen our locker rooms. The locker room situation, we’re talking about the NFL of our sport, it was unbelievable. They had four teams in a locker room the size of a broom closet. It was so unprofessional.
“I have it on good authority from people who would know — as close to knowing as you can — there were multiple fighters that missed weight and the commission just kind of let it slide. I don’t know if I’ll fight outside of Vegas again because these commissions are wonky. I hope they do the right thing and overturn this fight.”
