What a mess.
Earlier this week, online record keeper Tapology made an abrupt change to the professional record of UFC welterweight contender Michael Morales. The 26 year-old Ecuadorian was listed at 19-0
with 15 finishes but Tapology recently stumbled across a 2017 fight that saw Morales get slept on a local reality show.
By Tuesday morning, Morales was 19-1.
Not surprisingly, Morales issued a fiery response to the change and Tapology got creamed on social media for its decision. It also opened a debate as to what actually counts as an exhibition fight, with fans in defense of Tapology arguing that losing an MMA fight shouldn’t be protected by an arbitrary designation.
Nevertheless, Morales is back to 19-0.
“Update on the ‘Ultima Pelea’ league in Ecuador and its impact on Michael Morales MMA record,” Tapology posted on X. “We will reverse and classify these as exhibition. We look forward to many colorful replies on social media about how stupid we are. Thank you in advance. But above all we want to be fair and get this correct. 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.”
“For the last several years we have been very restrictive about allowing fighters or leagues to claim exhibition status,” Tapology added. “It has become a loophole for keeping legitimate fights off of records. It allows fighters to compete in otherwise professional bouts without it counting. 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,” Tapology said. “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 sh*t 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.”
Order has been restored … but from a branding perspective, the damage may have already been done.
No word yet on when Morales is expected to make his UFC return but something within the next few months is probable, depending on how matchmakers plan to chart this course. Morales was last seen beating up top welterweight contender Sean Brady at UFC 322 in New York.
