Ciryl Gane doesn't need to be plotting in a dark room for the fouling to be on him. That's what Dominick Cruz and TJ Dillashaw keep avoiding. They've come out to say they don't think Gane is a deliberate cheater, and fair enough: nobody can read his mind. What matters is whether a fighter who keeps committing the same fouls against different opponents, year after year, gets to call it bad luck. He doesn't. The responsibility is Gane's, and the Cruz-Dillashaw defense is excuse-making by two guys doing a colleague a professional courtesy.
Start with Cruz, because his argument eats itself. His line is that if you can poke him in the eyes, he's the one doing something wrong: "I always said, if you can poke me in my fucking eyes, I'm doing something wrong. You can punch me in my head. Like, trying to hit my head is so fucking hard. If you could poke me in the eye, like, that's my problem." Think about what that actually says. It makes the victim responsible for the foul. By Cruz's own logic, Tom Aspinall deserved to lose vision in his right eye because he let a hand get close. That's blaming the man who got hurt for the fact that someone else broke the rules.
It's a strange hill for Cruz specifically. He's been finished by strikes twice in his UFC career, stopped by Henry Cejudo and later by Marlon Vera. If the standard is "if you got hit, you were doing something wrong," then Cruz keeps indicting himself every time he opens his mouth. This is the same analyst who sat on commentary at UFC 229 and told everyone Conor McGregor was tiring Khabib Nurmagomedov out while Khabib was busy beating him senseless on the mat, right up until the choke. His read on who's in trouble and who isn't has been wrong before, in front of millions.
Dillashaw's version is softer and emptier. His defense is that everyone was a Pereira fan, so of course the crowd wanted every blow called illegal, and Gane wasn't aiming for anything, Pereira just moved his head into the shots. That explains the anger in the crowd. Whether the strikes were legal is a different question, one Dillashaw never answers.
Now the record, because this is where "accident" stops surviving contact. Gane poked Alexander Volkov in the eye back in their 2021 fight, and the referee warned him more than once to keep his fingers closed. His 2020 TKO over Junior Dos Santos drew criticism for illegal elbows to the back of the head. At UFC 321 in October 2025, the double eye poke on Aspinall was bad enough to force an official timeout at the 4:35 mark of the first round. Aspinall couldn't see out of his right eye inside the five-minute break, and the title fight was ruled a no-contest. Aspinall was later diagnosed with Brown's syndrome in both eyes. He wasn't cleared, and he vacated the belt. Then at UFC Freedom 250 in June 2026, where Gane stopped Alex Pereira, Pereira accused him of landing illegal shots to the back of the head, and Aspinall, watching, said they "look very illegal."
That's four different nights, four different opponents, and the fingers and elbows keep landing on the two targets the rulebook protects. A single eye poke can be an accident. A rap sheet spanning four fights and two different kinds of fouls isn't.
Cruz and Dillashaw have a real point buried in here: a reckless hand is different from a calculated one, and "cheater" is a heavy word for a fighter whose technique might just be sloppy and dangerous. Maybe Gane never once thought "I'm going to blind this man." Grant all of it; it changes nothing. A strike is legal or illegal regardless of intent. A foul is a foul whether the fighter meant it or not, and a fighter who's been warned, criticized, and no-contested over the exact same fouls has been told plainly what he's doing. Gane's answer to that was to call Aspinall "mentally fragile" and someone who "complains a bit too much," and to say he won't change: "This is MMA."
The shrug afterward is the problem. A fighter who respected the targets he keeps hitting would have cleaned it up by now, because the referees and his opponents have given him every reason to. Gane hasn't, and the sport has let him skate on no-contests and warnings instead of taking a point and making it stop. Cruz and Dillashaw probably believe what they're saying about Gane's heart. They've picked the one question that can't be answered and used it to dodge the one that can. Dock a point the next time his fingers go out and watch how fast the technique improves.
