Eric Nicksick is certainly not thrilled with the stoppage of Chris Curtis against Roman Kopylov at UFC Vegas 101, but that’s not what his biggest point of anger.

Kopylov picked up a third-round TKO win over Curtis on the main card this past Saturday in a fight that was stopped by referee Mark Smith with just one second left. Kopylov landed a head kick that dropped Curtis, Kopylov walked away, and Smith halted the bout. Curtis was livid, as was Nicksick, his head coach.

Nicksick believes there may be a bit of a vendetta, and was asked if he’d be willing to take the proper steps in removing Smith as a referee for all of his team’s bouts in the future.

“I’m going to find that out 100 percent,” Nicksick said on his podcast Verse Us. “It’s just too far gone. I know this guy too well, anecdotally, through all my experiences with him, and on a personal level of what I’ve seen with other people, other [fights]. There’s no way that this guy can’t hold a grudge or a bias. There’s just no way.

“He fraternizes with other gyms and teams and fighters and coaches, and everything else. So there’s just... to me the lines have been blurred. I think he’s an egomaniac. I’ve never heard of a ref ask people to vote for him for MMA Ref of the Year [at the World MMA Awards]. I’ve never gotten a text from Herzog, Herb Dean asking for votes for MMA Ref of the Year. ...

“Deep down, he’s a good dude. He’s a perfectionist, he tries to be the best at his craft. I can’t hate him on that, but he has an ego — and I do, too. Everyone does. But there’s no way that I believe that going forward, he’s going to give us a fair shake. I just don’t. He’s our Eddie ‘The Mush’ [from A Bronx Tale].”

Nicksick says the stoppage was just cherry on top of the sundae, and admits that Curtis shouldn’t have put himself in a position to get head kicked. In the moment when Nicksick was fired up, it appeared he was just as upset about the buzzer-beater controversial wave off as Curtis was.

It actually all began before either fighter made their way to the octagon.

“It was the fact that prior to the fight, the referee comes and asks, ‘Do you have any questions or concerns?’,” Nicksick explained. “Chris Curtis went on and said, ‘This guy will find ways to stall: What are you going to do if, and when he does stall? And how are you going to score it, or how are you going to handle that?’ We laid out a game plan of how we’re going to attack and approach the game plan — that Round 1 was going to broken up into two segments for us. Round 1 was going to be Rounds 1 and 2.

“The way that Chris fights, he starts slow, so I wanted him to pick up the pace. The pace was going to pick up the second half of Round 1, into Round 2 and, basically, the start of Round 3. But our question was, ‘When we start going downhill, and he starts to stall, how are you going to handle it?’ And we were told something different then the way he handled it in the fight. That’s what I’m pissed off about. You never get three timeouts in a f*cking fight.

“No. 1, spit his mouthpiece out. OK. ‘Hold on, let me get your mouthpiece,’ that wasn’t too bad. All right, groin strike. OK, time. Now this is, remember, when the momentum was where? Chris was going downhill. You guys hear me yelling ‘Oregon, no huddle,’ keep that f*cking offense on the field and keep the pressure. Then the eye poke.

“Calmly said to Mark, ‘Hey, that is two infractions in a row in this round. Where’s the point?’ And he looks back at myself and Nate [Pettit], and he’s like... ‘Let me f*cking handle...,’ OK, but we told you that this was going to happen prior and you gave us an answer of what you would do to handle it, and you’re not doing what you said to handle it. That’s what we were pissed off about.”

Curtis has now dropped two straight, and only has one victory to his name in his past five outings, and is now pondering a return to welterweight — where he competed most of his career before signing with the UFC.

Nicksick knows Curtis would’ve lost the decision had Smith not stopped the fight, but to him as a coach, and fighter advocate, it was the wrong way to end a fight like that.

“So the stoppage, questionable,” Nicksick said. “If you’re a f*cking... any fighter in the world knowing that there’s one second left, and the guy walks away — there’s not a follow-up punch, he’s not coming in to kill, whatever — the chances are we’re going to lose on the scorecard now, and I get that. In the moment, I felt we were up two rounds. I felt we [won the first two rounds]. Now looking back, we weren’t. We would’ve lost the decision. OK, it is what it is.

“You decided to stop the fight with one second left when there was no more damage that was going to be taken, when two guys poured their heart and soul out for 15 minutes and gave us a war, if you’ve ever done your homework and watched a Chris Curtis fight, King of Combat, that’s what you get. Let the motherf*cker go out on his shield, bro. That was some bitch shit.”