Weight cutting wars with RIZIN, Tapology, and Patchy Mix

How a fighter missing weight by six pounds turned into an international scandal.

Missing weight in Japanese MMA is considered the ultimate sin.

Doping? Loaded up on pain killers while fighting injured? Situational ethics apply.

But if you miss weight or don’t sell a certain amount of tickets as a club fighter? You’re on a road to getting blacklisted.

In September 2020, I wrote an article at Fight Opinion addressing some key Japanese MMA taboos raised by veteran On The Road Management manager Shu Hirata.

Penalties clauses in Japanese fighter contracts are terribly punishing.

Let’s say a Japanese fighter gets hurt the week of a scheduled fight and cannot participate. Their contract could stipulate that the fighter not only has to pay back all of the money they sold in tickets but also the money for tickets sold by their opponent. Meaning, if your fight purse is only a small amount but you were selling tickets for the fight to get a percentage, you could be severely damaged financially.

But how much is the penalty? If the ticket distribution system used by promoters to give tickets to fighters to sell isn’t modern, then pocketing the ticket money is very easy for fighters to do. How does the promoter know what is an accurate amount of tickets sold?

When it comes to missing weight for a fight in Japan, promotions like Shooto and RIZIN have turned punishment into an art form. Fans largely support their measures.

Making weight means you are a professional. Too many UFC fighters miss weight now for events, suffer a financial penalty, and still continue fighting knowing that if they win at all costs that there is a reward at the end of the rainbow.

Shooto has a system in which a fighter who misses weight can lose a point every round. RIZIN developed their own two-pronged punishment system that is now at the center of a large controversy involving veteran Bellator fighter Patchy Mix and MMA records keeper Tapology.

Not since the old days of PRIDE-flavored media outlets and supporters attacking foreign fans and writers have I seen such a beehive mentality in defending what is viewed as a righteous Japanese fight version of public policy.

Patchy Mix’s no good, very bad trip to Japan

Patchy Mix was scheduled for a bantamweight fight against veteran Japanese fighter Shoko Sato, who has nearly 60 professional bouts on his record. Mix missed weight by six pounds. His fight was relegated in the match order on the card.

RIZIN’s punishment for weight cutting

The promotion has a unique method of attacking fighters who grossly miss weight for fights.

Step one: deduct two points from that fighter.

Step two: even if the punished fighter somehow manages to win the fight, it will be ruled as a no contest.

This means that the punished fighter’s opponent cannot technically lose.

This is a long-standing RIZIN policy. Fighters like Johnny Case and Kleber Koike both faced punishment for missing weight, including Koike losing his RIZIN featherweight title.

Now, let’s apply this RIZIN policy standard to Patchy Mix. He faced Shoko Sato. Mix “won” on the score cards with a 29-28 decision. Except he really didn’t win. His win was nullified.

This became a huge controversy regarding Tapology.

Tapology is not a fan of RIZIN’s weight cutting policy

Tapology initially listed Patchy Mix as the winner of the fight, 29-28. Without consideration of RIZIN’s penalty, this is by-the-book.

However, Tapology’s decision created a very international controversy among very aggressive online RIZIN fans and talking heads.

Here is how Tapology initially addressed the criticism of their record keeping:

Regarding our result for Patchy Mix vs. Shoko Sato: for several years, Tapology’s policy has been not to alter a fight result based on point deductions or penalties imposed for actions outside the fight itself. We record the result produced by the judges’ scorecards.

This policy developed after situations where post-fight or administrative penalties could produce outcomes that we felt were inconsistent, arbitrary, or potentially open to manipulation. To provide the full picture, we built our system to display both the result of the fight itself and any subsequent result imposed by the promotion.

We recognize that no policy handles every situation perfectly. Even before today’s RIZIN event, we had been discussing whether certain circumstances should warrant exceptions to these rules. Today’s unusual situation will certainly be part of those discussions.

For now, we will continue to display Mix-Sato according to our existing policy while clearly noting RIZIN’s official ruling.

This response irritated RIZIN fans, front office officials, and some talking heads closely aligned to RIZIN. It was the usual “arrogant foreigner” criticism.

• Shingo “Charlie” Kashiwagi, the extremely talented and fluently bilingual RIZIN matchmaker, highlighted Tapology’s decision.

• Shoko Sato wanted Tapology to reverse their decision.

• Kenji Osawa, a well-respected veteran and current MMA commentator, stated that the rules each fight organization sets for scoring should be respected.

There was also plenty of heat in American MMA circles, too. One person even attempted to argue that Tapology was protecting Patchy Mix because he is represented by Ali Abdelaziz. The We Are RIZIN podcast accused Tapology of using incorrect data for Japanese fighter gyms. Various Twitter users argued that a double standard was being applied because various Brazilian fight promotions like Wallid Ismail’s Jungle Fight have their own sliding scale of penalties for fighters missing weight.

However, there were some notable voices in the online MMA space coming to Tapology’s defense. Including Zane Simon:

This stupid Mix/Tapology thing strikes a deeper core about combat sports. Fighting is not about scoring points. The points are only supposed to be there if the fighters don't fight well enough. Whenever possible we should avoid making any part of the sport focused on the points.

Zane doubled down in response to criticism.

Because the promotion interfered with the official rendered scorecard. Seems like a reasonable argument to me.

If it’s that big a problem that these considerations need to be taken into account then the promoter shouldn’t hold the fight and/or it shouldn’t be considered a legit contest. It’s gamifying the sport in useless stupid ways and shouldn’t be taken as a reasonable idea.

Look, I'm not saying don't have points. I'm just saying points should never be at the forefront of our concept of the sport. They're a secondary idea

Which is why I will forever love the old PRIDE “pick a winner” rules system.

Japanese MMA still views Sherdog as the king of record keeping outside Japan

This is the largely unspoken theme in this controversy.

In response to all of the criticism over unilaterally declaring Patchy Mix the winner at RIZIN 54, Tapology issued this public response on August 12.

We've read the many responses to this. A lot of you strongly disagree with how we have classified the Mix-Sato fight, and we can see why.

As we said yesterday, even before this fight we had been discussing whether our rules around weight-miss penalties should change. That review is continuing.

One point we want to emphasize: Tapology's record-keeping policies have to work for far more than major promotions like RIZIN. The overwhelming majority of the events we document are smaller regional shows around the world, often with limited documentation and conflicting accounts of what happened.

In this environment, independent standards matter. We can’t automatically treat whatever a promoter announces as authoritative. Having consistent rules for verifying and recording results is key to what we do.

That doesn't mean our current policy is necessarily the best possible one. The Mix-Sato situation highlights legitimate arguments for allowing certain pre-established weight-miss penalties to factor into the result we record.

But we also don't think the right response is to discard a policy we've applied consistently for several years overnight. If we change the rule, we want to replace it with a better one that is clearly defined, resistant to abuse, and continues to protect fighters from arbitrary changes to their records.

Please give us a little time.

In his own personal capacity, Steven Kelliher addressed the allegations that Tapology is “imposing” its own ideology while gate-keeping as a records database.

People otherwise well versed in MMA have no idea how international MMA works.

Without databases categorizing this stuff, there would be no international fighter records recognized by any US commission.

The vast majority of international fighter records you see are unsanctioned.

We have plenty of internal debate on these policies, and cannot pretend to have the right answer.

What's astounding, however is the number of people who think it's totally cool to simply accept whatever a specific promotion says about the result of a fight. Not a real sport ;)

I have been covering MMA data professionally for 17 years. There is no such thing as regulated international MMA. Every record you see was decided by an independent database and then accepted by a US Commission.

Start there ... and THEN argue about whether something is right.

Where we do begin?

This episode clearly demonstrates that Tapology has built itself into an important part of the MMA ecosystem. People wouldn’t be fighting as vigorously as they are if this wasn’t the case.

However, there are two kind of contradictory forces clashing with each other here on a historical level.

In Japan, Sherdog was always viewed as the gold standard for record keeping with Fight Finder. Sherdog built an incredibly strong brand during the PRIDE days. Many PRIDE veterans who were fighters, trainers, promoters, talking heads, and boosters are still involved with RIZIN — even if RIZIN’s audience is very different than the PRIDE audience was.

Go “Shiroobi” Yamamoto attends RIZIN events as media and is currently involved in Sherdog’s Fight Finder. He works very hard.

Despite Sherdog’s long-standing decline over the last decade, their web site still maintains a strong identity in Japan for record keeping and compliance.

Tapology has really built a strong brand as a records database and has taken advantage of Sherdog’s decline.

Tapology has their public policy. RIZIN has their own public policy.

I enjoy RIZIN and view the promotion as the number two player. Oktagon, KSW, PFL/MVP MMA, and others have a higher profile internationally but RIZIN owns the Japanese marketplace. Japan is still a crown jewel for fight sports, despite the horrific devaluation of the yen and America’s attempts to prop it up in order to likely prevent the Japanese government from dumping US Treasuries.

The controversy involving Tapology highlights larger issues for RIZIN. It is a fight promotion featuring very crafty old-school Japanese promoters who offer a little bit of everything to everyone. Their main shows use a ring. Their Landmark events are in a cage. They have different rules compared to the Unified Rules. I have long argued that promoters outside of the UFC should confront TKO’s regulatory capture head-on. The cage and the Unified Rules were marketed to the masses by the Fertittas as a necessary in order to legalize the sport in America. In reality, it was all about creating legal and marketing capture. If it’s not the UFC, it’s not MMA.

Oh, you promote MMA in a ring? That’s not UFC. You use PRIDE rules? That’s just uncivilized. You punish fighters on the score cards with automatic point deductions for missing weight? That doesn’t happen in America.

This push-and-pull really is at the heart of a larger friction as RIZIN grows in popularity internationally. A one-size-fits-all approach in record-keeping international MMA is a painful battle. Fight sport is not FIFA. Multiple disciplines have multiple rules and regulations. Not all of MMA should look or feel like UFC.

Zach Arnold is lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com. Contact Zach: fightopinion at protonmail dot com.