Herb Dean stopped the semifinal fight between Xavier Franklin and Illimbek Akylbek Uulu in the third round, sent it to video review and then restarted it after ruling there had been an eye poke. What looked like a finish turned into another scramble, and Franklin stayed alive long enough to keep punching after the reset.
That decision landed in Episode 10 of The Ultimate Fighter 34, where Franklin and Akylbek Uulu were meeting as teammates from Team Bisping with a semifinal spot on the line. Franklin’s corner had already told him in the final minute that he needed a finish, which made every exchange feel like a last chance rather than a closing stretch.
The moments leading into the stoppage mattered because the fight had already been tight at the edges. In round two, Dean broke up a clinch along the fence and reset the fighters at center just before the horn, a sign that neither man was getting easy ground. By the time round three began, Franklin likely needed a stoppage, and he started pressing with body shots.
Then came the sequence that changed the shape of the bout. After Franklin landed to the body, Akylbek Uulu bent over and pawed at his eye. He motioned that there had been an eye poke, and Dean immediately called for a video review. The restart followed because the replay check backed up that the foul had happened, which is the standard reason to wipe out the apparent end of an exchange and send the fighters back in.
What made the call so stark was the timing. A fight that seemed done in the third round was suddenly alive again, and Franklin ripped the body once more after the restart. That does not erase the fact that the eye poke interrupted the action at the exact moment when the bout appeared to be tilting one way, but it does show that the foul did not end the contest on the spot. Dean’s ruling changed the rhythm, and in a semifinal that was already hanging on each clean shot, rhythm was part of the result.
There was also a wider Team Bisping backdrop around the fight. Michael Bisping had been keeping his coaching broad rather than handing out specific game plans, saying he was doing general coaching to keep things fair. Daniel Cormier had framed the series as more than fighting, pointing to the relationships built along the way, while Team Cormier spent the week away from the cage and went mini-golfing as the semifinal was prepared.
For Franklin, the important point now is not whether the interruption felt harsh in the moment. It is that the referee’s review reopened a fight that had appeared to be slipping away and gave him one more shot at forcing a finish. The unanswered question is the one that matters most in a bracket fight: after Dean restarted it, did Franklin turn that second life into the one thing his corner had demanded from the start?
