Joey Munoz: The Scottsbluff Firefighter Who Fights for the Love of It
Scottsbluff firefighter and Average Joe's MMA product Joey Munoz on wrestling roots, hard challenges and why he keeps fighting.
Joey Munoz has two jobs that ask a lot of a person. One is with the fire department in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. The other is in the cage, where the Dynasty professional comes in at 7-4 in MMA and 1-0 in professional bare knuckle.
Speaking to MMA Futures in September 2026, Munoz came across as someone who has thought hard about why he does this. His answer is simple.
"I fight to fight... until I no longer enjoy it, I'm gonna keep on doing it."
From the wrestling room to the cage
Munoz's story starts on the mat. He wrestled in high school, and right after graduation he started training for the cage. He has built himself into an all-around fighter out of Average Joe's MMA in Gering, Nebraska, just next door to his hometown of Scottsbluff.
In MMA he has competed between 145 and 155 pounds. Over the years his path has crossed with some familiar Nebraska names: he has shared the cage with both Darrick Minner and Sean Wilson.
He doesn't go looking for comfortable matchups, and he said so plainly.
"I'm not here for the easy ones. I'm here for the ones that are gonna push me."
That attitude shows up in how he trains, too. Munoz told MMA Futures he has been cross-training away from home, putting in time at West Coast Fight Team in Seattle and Genesis Fight Academy in Denver.
Fighting fire
About three years before that interview, Munoz joined the fire department in Scottsbluff. He is a member of Local 1454. He told MMA Futures, with a bit of a grin in the telling, that he and his fellow firefighters can fight fire and they can fight people too.
It is easy to see why the two worlds fit him. Both ask you to stay calm when things get chaotic and to be ready before you know exactly what you are walking into. Munoz has a line he likes to give fans that sums that up.
"Don't blink, because you don't know what's gonna happen."
He has lived that kind of short notice in his own career. His first bare knuckle bout came together when he got a call basically the day before. He was asked to cut 20 pounds, did it, and went five rounds. That fight is the 1-0 on his bare knuckle ledger.
A Nebraska fighter, through and through
For all the travel to Seattle and Denver, Munoz is rooted at home. He is a Scottsbluff man training in Gering, working for his own city, and he talks about the sport in Nebraska with real affection. When he described the people he competes against from around the state, he kept it friendly and simple.
"We're just two Nebraska guys who love to fight."
That line says a lot about how Munoz sees the whole thing. It isn't about grudges or noise. It's about people from the same part of the country who happen to share a strange, demanding passion, and who respect each other for it.
He is honest about the parts of the sport that get to him. Nerves, he said, show up more when he is in somebody else's corner than when he is the one competing, because from the corner there is only so much he can do. It's a telling detail about someone who clearly cares about his teammates as much as his own work.
You can follow Joey Munoz and keep up with his career on his Dynasty roster profile. For a firefighter from Scottsbluff who walked straight from the wrestling room into cage training, the reason he keeps showing up hasn't changed: he still loves it.