Renato Moicano is ranked twelfth at lightweight and he's not happy with how his UFC Vegas 123 main event ended. Fighting at the Meta APEX on a Halloween themed card, Moicano was working from Tom Nolan's back with a closed guard in the second round when referee Dan Miragliotta stood the two fighters up. Nolan went on to finish Moicano with elbows in the third round at 1:28, handing him the loss by TKO.

The stoppage decision drew immediate backlash. Big John McCarthy, who has officiated UFC fights himself, criticized Miragliotta's positioning and called the stand up unfair. Moicano isn't pushing for the result to be thrown out, but he made clear he was not happy with how the referee handled the sequence.

Our own numbers show just how close this fight was before the stoppage swung it. Moicano sits at 1564 on our Elo rating built from seven bouts, while Nolan, now ranked fourteenth at lightweight, rates 1578 from the same number of fights. Nolan moves up the lightweight picture off the win, while Moicano now has to figure out what's next.

What's next, by his own account, won't be much longer. Moicano says he has three fights remaining on his current UFC contract and plans to retire once they're done. He's framed it as wanting to walk away on his own terms rather than hang around too long, specifically saying he doesn't want to become the next Tony Ferguson, whose Elo has fallen to 1431 across his last three bouts in our tracker.

Moicano, 37, summed up his thinking simply. 'You have to realize when you're done,' he said. Whether his final UFC run includes a rematch with Nolan or a path back toward the lightweight rankings remains an open question, but the clock on his career is now openly ticking.