Miranda Maverick on Maycee Barber fight judges: ‘I don’t know what they were watching’

Maycee Barber got back in the win column in her last time out against Miranda Maverick — but not without some controversy.

UFC Vegas 32 saw the pair of ranked UFC flyweights do battle in what ended up going to the judges. As a result, Barber received the split decision victory over Maverick.

“I really thought I had dominated the first and second round,” Maverick told Jimmy Smith on MMA on Sirius. “I tell everybody, as a fighter, when you’re in there, when you get hit two times in a round, sometimes there’s this thought process of, ‘Oh, I might have lost,’ (laughs)

“It’s one of those things that you never know. But I’ve gotten to once you have enough experience, you just know. You can feel a round out, you know what you did in that round, I know I took her back, I know I dominated — in my view, I dominated the second round. The third round, a lot of people were like, ‘Oh, you stepped back, you got lazy.’ I was tired. I fought about as hard as I could in the first and second round. Maybe I could have done more, getting off the wall. Hindsight is 20/20, you know?

The loss was only the third of Miranda Maverick’s still-young career — her first by split decision. Despite the official scores, the MMA community couldn’t have disagreed more.

As per MMADecisions.com, all 22 out of 22 MMA media members scored the fight 29-28 for Maverick giving her 10-9s in the first two rounds with the third a 10-9 to Barber. 89.9 percent of the 537 fan votes scored the fight in favor of Norfolk’s Miranda Maverick.

“Either way, after the fight, I definitely thought I had won it,” Maverick said. “I had my doubts once they started calling the decision. When they said it was split, I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ And I almost knew as soon as they said it was a split decision, somewhere inside me I knew I lost.

“I think Maycee is very hyped up. You could see on the UFC’s media, she had three posts leading up to fight week. I had zero. Dana White, she had a post, I had zero. I don’t know why she’s so hyped, maybe it’s because she started out the youngest in the UFC, I don’t know if it’s something they want to push the arrogance that she started out with in her career. I will say she was respectful to me before the fight and after the fight, I’m not even gonna whine about what she said about winning, anybody would do that. What’re you gonna say? ‘Oh, yeah, I lost that fight.’ No. Nobody’s gonna say that. Giving her crap about it is not right, the judges, however, yeah, I don’t know what they were looking at.

“It is what it is,” she finished. “It’s one of those things where I can’t do anything about it, whether I won or not, the decision was made and my money, unfortunately, took a hit.”

The loss snaps a five-fight winning streak for Miranda Maverick while Maycee Barber gets back on track following back-to-back losses to Roxanne Modafferi and Alexa Grasso.