Urijah Faber's Tech Fall And The RAF Pay Floor That Actually Checked Out

Urijah Faber wanted you to know wrestling pays now. He told Ariel Helwani that Real American Freestyle wrestlers can make "as much as a doctor or a lawyer if you have four or five matches in a year." He said that had never been heard of in wrestling, which was why people were going to be tuning in.

He also got tech-falled 13-1 by Arman Tsarukyan two weeks earlier.

That's the part the pitch kept glossing over. The UFC Hall of Famer who made the rounds for RAF's pay structure was the same guy who, at RAF 8, tried to corner Tsarukyan against the edge of the elevated stage, ate a single leg, and got dumped over the side into the front row before his own gauntlet even started. The match ended at 13-1. A tech fall, the kind of result wrestlers reserve for opponents they've decided not to extend the courtesy of a real match to. Two days later, Faber was on Helwani's couch congratulating Tsarukyan as a "spoiled kid" and walking through the math on RAF salaries.

That's where snark normally gets to be enough. It wasn't. Because everything Faber said turned out to be, on the available evidence, broadly true. Tsarukyan, the guy who treated Faber like a hood ornament, told Helwani that yes, his RAF purse was "almost" matching what he gets from the UFC. And we knew what he gets from the UFC. He'd told Bloody Elbow two weeks before that his UFC contract had just been doubled on the back of the $7.7 billion Paramount deal.

So the floor Faber publicly set at "doctor or lawyer income" — call it $200K–$400K a year, generous in either direction depending on the city — was the same floor a UFC top-five lightweight on a freshly doubled contract was privately confirming from above. Same news cycle. Eight months into the promotion's existence.

RAF 9 Became Where The Pitch Stopped Sounding Crazy

The promotion was barely a year old. It had a Fox Nation broadcast deal, a streaming partnership the company kept expanding, and a lineup that, on paper, read like a UFC roster bug.

• RAF 9, May 30, College Park Center, Arlington. Reigning UFC bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili, three days off the cover of every MMA homepage, was set to wrestle former lightweight champion Frankie Edgar. He was supposed to be wrestling Henry Cejudo. Cejudo got hurt. RAF pivoted to Edgar without losing the slot, the date, or the broadcast window.
• Gable Steveson was on the card vs. former UFC heavyweight Alexandr Romanov.
• Colby Covington was on the card for the third straight RAF appearance, this time against Chris Weidman.

That was a reigning UFC champion, an Olympic gold medalist who kept pretending he was about to sign with the UFC, and two former UFC champions, on a single Saturday night, on a wrestling card, in May. None of them were doing it for free.

The thing nobody wanted to write down for the first six months of RAF's existence was that wrestlers, historically, did not get paid. The whole conceit of American collegiate wrestling had been that it was the most popular sport in a state where nobody on the team could buy their own dinner. RAF showed up in summer 2025 and started cutting checks big enough to make retired UFC champions willing to drive to Arlington in May. The same checks made a 46-year-old Hall of Famer voluntarily eat a 13-1 tech fall on national broadcast and then, 48 hours later, do unpaid promotional work for the platform that cashed it.

That was the part that should have landed for the people doing this for $40 a Sunday at the local tournament. The first major American wrestling promotion in a generation paid. Not a lot of them, not yet. There was no public number on what an RAF undercard purse looked like, and the doctor-lawyer line presumably applied to the Cejudos and Stevesons of the roster, not the regional kid making his RAF debut. But the ceiling was high enough, on the public evidence, that it pulled a UFC bantamweight champion onto a card three weeks before his next title cycle.

What The UFC Would And Wouldn't Block

The other thing nobody wanted to say out loud was what UFC would and wouldn't clear. Tsarukyan had asked the UFC for a Covington grappling match at RAF 9. The UFC said no. The same week, the UFC approved two other RAF appearances on the same card. Dana White was on record approving Tsarukyan vs. Mikey Musumeci as a UFC BJJ event. Dvalishvili was on the May 30 wrestling card three weeks before his next defense.

The contracts inside the UFC office weren't blocking guys from grappling and wrestling on someone else's stage. They were blocking specific matches the UFC didn't want to greenlight. In Tsarukyan's reading, that math ran through the front office. In Faber's reading, it ran through the broadcast deal and the math of four to five matches a year at salary.

Both could be true. Both probably were.

The Awkward Part If You Trained

What was uncomfortable, if you trained BJJ, was that the second-largest pay floor in combat sports at that moment was wrestling. Not Bellator. Not One. Wrestling. A sport that had been a national punchline for being unable to cover its own travel two years earlier. The reason wasn't hype. It wasn't a Saudi billionaire with a boat in Riyadh or the Real American Freestyle branding with the giant flag behind it. It was the broadcast deal.

Faber was allowed to get tech-falled by his own promotion's most marketable asset and still be the guy on Helwani's couch the next day, because RAF didn't actually need its 46-year-old founder-figure to win matches. It needed him to be on Helwani's couch the next day saying "doctor or lawyer money."

He did his job. Tsarukyan corroborated it. Dvalishvili, on May 30, became the proof.

The question every grappler under 30 had to ask in the weeks that followed was whether they were better off going pro at the only American grappling discipline that had, for the first time in their lifetime, decided it had a budget, or whether they were going to keep waiting for the IBJJF to figure out it was allowed to pay people too.

Faber, eating his appearance fee and a 13-1 score, had already answered.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• Ariel Helwani — Faber on RAF pay (X post with clip)
• BJJDoc — Urijah Faber on RAF Pay: 'As Much As A Doctor Or A Lawyer'
• BJJDoc — Tsarukyan: RAF Is Paying Me As Much As The UFC
• Bloody Elbow — Tsarukyan suggests UFC pay doubled after $7.7B Paramount deal
• Cageside Press — Merab Dvalishvili vs. Frankie Edgar Added To RAF 09