Following four punishing rounds against Amanda Nunes at UFC 224, Raquel Pennington said she was “done.” However, her corner men convinced her to go back out for the fifth and final round, and they were criticized for doing so after Pennington took a further beating that many found unnecessary and upsetting.

Pennington had been getting crushed the first 20 minutes against the UFC’s bantamweight champion in their title fight Saturday, but she paid for it with a nose that was the most visible sign of the damage inflicted by Nunes’s punches and kicks. As she sat in her corner after the fourth round, she told her coaches, “I’m done.”

“I want to be done,” she added.

“No, no, no,” the 29-year-old Colorado native was told. “Let’s power through this. Let’s believe. Change your mind-set. Change your mind-set. Let’s just throw everything we got. We’ll recover later. Throw everything we got.”  

 “Sometimes when you’re tired and you don’t think you have enough left, your coach’s job is to pull the most out of you,” Tate said. “I think that’s what the corner was trying to do — not let her give up on herself, get her back into the game, mentally.”  

If a fighter wants out, they should be able to stop a fight. This is not right, she could have gotten hurt even worse.