Patchy Mix is out at RIZIN. Japanese outlet Dropkick reported that the former Bellator bantamweight champion was removed from the promotion’s active roster and had the rest of his contract terminated, and MMA Mania picked up the story Tuesday night. RIZIN hasn’t put out an official statement yet.
The writing was on the wall in August. Mix came down from featherweight to face Shoko Sato at RIZIN 54 and stepped on the scale at 140.7 pounds for a 134.4-pound bantamweight bout. That’s a 6.3-pound miss. RIZIN docked him two points, and under the promotion’s special rules he couldn’t officially win the fight even if he outworked Sato. He didn’t. Sato took a unanimous decision. RIZIN CEO Nobuyuki Sakakibara publicly called the situation unacceptable, and promotion officials acknowledged at the time that cutting Mix’s contract was on the table. Mix apologized afterward, writing, “Very sorry to my opponent, the boss, and RIZIN fans.”
His RIZIN debut hadn’t gone any better. Mix signed with the promotion to start over at 145 pounds, and at RIZIN 52 in March, 19-year-old Kyoma Akimoto stopped him in the second round. It was the first stoppage loss of Mix’s career. Akimoto has since climbed to 13-1 and will challenge featherweight champion Razhabali Shaidulloev (19-0) for the belt at Super RIZIN 6 on Dec. 31 in Nagoya, which is a rough thing for Mix to watch from the outside.
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The slide started in the UFC. Mix signed there in May 2025 after leaving the PFL in the wake of the Bellator merger, arriving at 20-1 as one of the most sought-after free agents in the sport. He dropped a unanimous decision to Mario Bautista at UFC 316 in June 2025, then lost a split decision to short-notice replacement Jakub Wiklacz at UFC 320 that October. The UFC let him go in January 2026. Mix later said his bantamweight cuts had been “really brutal on my body and on my performance,” and that was the stated reason for the move to featherweight in the first place.
That makes four straight losses for a guy whose Bellator résumé reads like a bantamweight top 10: Kyoji Horiguchi, Raufeon Stots, Magomed Magomedov and Sergio Pettis. He won the 2023 Grand Prix final with a first-round knee that knocked out Stots at Bellator 295, then choked out Pettis in the second round at Bellator 301 to take the title. He also submitted Yuki Motoya in 97 seconds at RIZIN 20 back in 2019. He’s 33, and 13 of his wins have come by submission.
My take: the losses to Bautista and Wiklacz were close enough to forgive, and getting caught by a rising 19-year-old happens. Missing by 6.3 pounds is a different category of problem. Mix left bantamweight specifically because the cut was wrecking him, then went back to it and proved his own point in the worst way possible. Whoever signs him next shouldn’t care much about the grappling, which still travels. They should care about whether he’s done with 135 for good, because a fighter who can’t make weight can’t be booked, and right now that’s the only question on his résumé that matters.
