Rising UFC star livid after site changes his perfect career record to show reality TV loss

“I am going to hit injustice right in the face,” Morales wrote in Spanish. “F*ck you, Tapology.”

Morales’ message was accompanied by a laughing emoji and a middle finger emoji.

According to Tapology, even though the bout was part of a pre-taped television program, “The rules and structure of the fights meet our criteria of professional MMA.” See their statement below.

Making matters more confusing is Ultima Pelea’s comparison to TUF. The UFC’s long-running reality competition program has always classified bouts on the show as exhibitions that should not be counted on a fighter’s pro record (one reason for this is to prevent results of the pre-taped show to be leaked before the fights are broadcast). However, there is no clear indication that Ultima Pelea bouts are intended to be viewed as exhibitions.

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The bouts on Ultima Pelea also feature slightly different rules than most fight fans are used to, including the duration being two five-minute rounds, and elbows not being permitted, but this is not unique to the Ecuadorian show and countless pro fighters have bouts with differing rules mixed into their records (Khabib Nurmagomedov being a prominent example).

Record-keeping site Sherdog also issued a statement in response to the controversy, noting their decision to keep Morales’ record unaltered.

This kind of discussion isn’t exclusive to events outside of North America, as TUF has also featured fighters losing on the show and continuing to be billed as undefeated. One recent example is Bryce Mitchell, who made his official UFC debut at 9-0 despite being submitted by Brad Katona on their season of TUF in 2018.

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Morales’ undefeated status is of great interest to fans and possibly the UFC’s matchmakers as they decide who should be the next challenger for welterweight champion Islam Makhachev. In his most recent outing, Morales scored a first-round knockout of top contender Sean Brady to improve to 7-0 in the UFC.

For MMA Fighting’s purposes, Morales will continue to be listed at 19-0 overall.

You can judge for yourself by checking out Morales’ Ultima Pelea submission loss below.

UPDATE: Tapology issued a follow-up Wednesday, stating they will restore Morales’ record to 19-0 in their database and consider his Ultima Pelea fights to be exhibitions.

The site added, “We add hundreds of fights daily to Tapology and try to evaluate them consistently. This is difficult to do given the different kinds of fights and circumstances that are sent our way. One category of fight that we have been getting far more strict about is EXHIBITION fights.

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“For the last several years we have been very restrictive about allowing fighters or leagues to claim exhibition status. It has become a loophole for keeping legitimate fights off of records. It allows fighters to compete in otherwise professional bouts without it counting. It had become increasingly difficult to explain why one scenario could count as exhibition but another couldn’t, and in almost all scenarios we felt the fights were all hard-fought, legitimate MMA contests.

“As a result new events being sent to us, even if a reality show format, are generally not exempt from counting on Tapology win/loss record. This is the standard we applied to reviewing the ‘Ultimate Pelea’ events that we found footage of this week. What’s not fair and not consistent is that we are applying a roughly 2023-forward framework to a 2017 event. If this event had been reported to us in 2017, we would have certainly accepted it as exhibition at that time.

“This is the crux of how we agree we were incorrect when we classified these yesterday. We apologize for the shit storm and we appreciate all the interesting feedback we received. Yes some of the feedback was fairly dumb. But some of it contained good and helpful arguments.”