Dana White isn’t exactly rushing to defend one of MMA’s most controversial techniques. Instead, the UFC boss appears to be on board with California State Athletic Commission executive director Andy Foster’s push to potentially make lateral knee kicks illegal under the Unified Rules of MMA.

Foster raised the idea during the commission’s post-event debrief following UFC 331 in Los Angeles on September 20. The proposal isn’t an immediate rule change, though. The idea is to first discuss whether lateral knee kicks should remain legal before making any final decision.

MMA reporter Aaron Bronsteter previously reported that Foster wanted officials to discuss “making lateral knee kicks a foul.” Now, the head honcho has made the UFC’s stance pretty clear during a Dana White’s Contender Series press conference.

“Look, he’s the most powerful guy in the commission anywhere in the world. And, yeah, we don’t disagree,” White said.

The proposal comes after Edmen Shahbazyan appeared to complain to the referee about a side kick to the knee during his unanimous decision win over Brunno Ferreira at UFC 331. The funny part? The kick was completely legal under the Unified Rules, although Shahbazyan seemed to think otherwise.

That’s also where the bigger debate comes in. Oblique kicks and other lateral strikes to the knee are usually handled pretty carefully in training, with fighters often told not to throw them with full force. Andy Foster now wants to take a closer look at whether that same concern should apply when the gloves are on and the stakes are real.

Still, this is nowhere near an actual rule change yet. If the proposal gains any momentum, it would have to go through the proper regulatory process before lateral knee kicks could officially become a foul.

MMA has been down this road before. The sport has changed its stance on plenty of techniques over the years, with soccer kicks and stomps to grounded opponents facing restrictions, while the infamous 12-to-6 elbow spent more than two decades on the banned list.

And the 12-to-6 elbow is a pretty interesting example here. When the rules were first being put together, regulators saw fighters using vertical elbows to smash bricks and worried that the same motion could cause serious damage to a fighter’s skull.

The problem? That theory didn’t really hold up. Physics eventually showed that a straight up-and-down elbow isn’t automatically more dangerous than an elbow thrown on a diagonal.

That eventually changed the conversation around the 12-to-6 elbow, with the Association of Boxing Commissions voting in late 2024 to remove the ban and make the technique legal again.

For now, though, lateral knee kicks are still completely legal under the Unified Rules. Andy Foster is only asking for a discussion about potentially making them a foul, while Dana White has already made it clear that the UFC isn’t exactly against the idea. However, there is one from the UFC world who seems to be against the plan.

Matt Brown disagrees with Dana White and Andy Foster over the oblique kick ban

Matt Brown isn’t exactly sold on the idea of taking oblique kicks out of MMA. The former UFC welterweight has pushed back on the growing discussion around the California State Athletic Commission’s proposal to make the technique illegal, making it clear that he doesn’t seem to think the kick needs to disappear from the sport.

And if the Unified Rules do eventually change, it wouldn’t just be a California issue. Major promotions like the UFC would have to treat oblique kicks as fouls in sanctioned fights.

One fight keeps coming up whenever the oblique-kick debate pops up: Ian Garry vs. Shavkat Rakhmonov at UFC 310. ‘The Future’ went back to the technique over and over during the fight and later took to social media, claiming his oblique kicks did serious damage to Rakhmonov’s knee and even played a part in derailing the welterweight contender’s career.

Fight breakdowns only added fuel to the discussion, with footage showing one of the Irishman’s kicks catching Shavkat Rakhmonov’s advancing leg right around the knee. But there’s another pretty important piece of the puzzle here.

‘Nomad’ later revealed that he was already taking a huge gamble by stepping into the Octagon with a serious knee injury and without a proper ligament. His leg had also been badly swollen in the weeks leading up to the fight.

“I already had an injury going into the Ian Garry fight,” Rakhmonov told ALF Global. “I stepped up. I hadn’t fought for a year; I wanted to fight. Even before that, I had health problems, too, and it turned out there were only two weeks left before the Ian Garry fight.

“That old injury was still bothering me a lot. My leg was swollen. When he was striking me, it was probably because I completely lacked a ligament. I couldn’t really feel that strike, in general.”

That puts a pretty big asterisk on the idea that Ian Garry’s oblique kicks were responsible for Shavkat Rakhmonov’s later knee problems.

Matt Brown, meanwhile, isn’t buying the argument that oblique kicks being dangerous is enough reason to kick them out of MMA.

“‘Oblique kicks can be dangerous and end a person’s career’ as opposed to punching/elbowing/kneeing/kicking him in the face and bruising his brain?” he wrote on X. “These guys are so weird; the entire point of a fight is to inflict bodily harm. Is that not obvious to them?”

He was then asked whether that same logic should apply to techniques that are already banned, like eye pokes and groin strikes. However, Brown didn’t completely shut the door on that idea either.

“Not totally against it, but the real problem is that it becomes an eye-poking and d— kicking contest, which just isn’t so interesting,” he responded.

For now, nothing has actually changed. Oblique kicks remain legal, and there’s no immediate change coming to the Unified Rules. But what we do know now is that everyone is surely paying their attention to it. Foster wants the technique discussed. Dana White has indicated that the UFC doesn’t disagree with the proposal. And Matt Brown? He’s clearly not convinced MMA needs to go down that road.