On Sunday in Rome, a Hype Fighting promoter stood at a press conference with a main event and no opponent. Dillon Danis had pulled out of his grappling match with Colby Covington because of an injury, and the promoter asked the room whether anyone wanted the spot. Raul Rosas Jr. was sitting in the audience. He put his hand up, told the room he’d do it (with a profanity attached for emphasis) and capped it with his signature “Chiwiwis!”
Three days later, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, Rosas submitted Covington with a rear-naked choke 43 seconds into a 10-minute, submission-only main event at Hype Italy, per MMA Mania. Hype’s own account posted it as 40 seconds, and Bloody Elbow’s headline had it at 37. Pick your stopwatch. None of the versions run past a minute.
How the 43 seconds went
The sequence is simple, and the order matters. Rosas walked forward immediately, put Covington on the mat early, then caught the back during a transition and sank the choke while Covington failed to peel the choking arm off his neck. Hype’s account captioned one clip “Slick in transition,” which is the correct description. The submission came from the scramble. There was no long grind on top.
View post on X
The takedown is the part I keep rewinding. Covington was a Division I All-American at Oregon State, a two-time Pac-10 champion at 174 pounds, and he has spent 2026 going 5-0 in Real American Freestyle, beating Luke Rockhold, Danis, Chris Weidman, Arman Tsarukyan (for the inaugural RAF Cruiserweight Crossover title) and Belal Muhammad. A UFC bantamweight took that man down in the opening seconds. Bloody Elbow noted the takedown alone shocked the crowd before the choke ever showed up.
My read on the back take: this is a ruleset trap. In freestyle, when you hit the mat, you work to come up, and turning away from your opponent to stand is a normal, low-cost reflex. In submission-only, there are no points to protect and no stalls to wait out, so showing your back in a scramble is the most expensive mistake on the menu. Covington’s wrestling instincts were probably the thing that got him choked.
Why it happened
Covington more or less told us. After the match he acknowledged his slow start, said he hadn’t trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu in years and that his focus has been wrestling, and he didn’t offer excuses. He does have a 2013 FILA no-gi world grappling gold on his resume. That medal is 13 years old, and every match he’s won this year was contested under freestyle rules.
The broadcast commentators questioned whether he took the match lightly, and his calendar makes that question fair. Covington is set to face Khamzat Chimaev on the RAF mats on Nov. 14, and he said afterward he’s looking ahead to his next Hype match against UFC lightweight Ignacio Bahamondes on Dec. 20. My read is that nobody rebuilds their back defense in a three-day camp against a replacement while a Chimaev match sits on the horizon. He took a short-notice booking against a smaller man and got caught doing what he always does.
View post on X
Then there’s Rosas, who is far more dangerous in this exact situation than his weight class suggests. He started wrestling in high school, won IMMAF world gold in Rome (the same city) at 14, and his UFC numbers read like a wrestler’s: 33 takedowns, tied for fifth most in bantamweight history, plus 16 in one fight against Rob Font at 88.9% accuracy. He sits third all time among UFC bantamweights in control time percentage (37.6%). He also finished Ricky Turcios with a rear-naked choke in 2024, and he’s been in this exact format before, drawing former two-time flyweight champion Deiveson Figueiredo at Hype FC Brazil in April. Covington was making his Hype debut.
Size gets mentioned a lot here, and it should. Rosas competes at bantamweight. Covington spent his UFC career at welterweight and holds a cruiserweight crossover belt. My read is that size wins a long hand fight against the cage or a 10-minute stalemate. It does much less when the smaller man is already behind you with an arm under your chin.
What it means
For Rosas, this is a viral moment stacked on top of a real run. He’s 22, on a six-fight MMA winning streak, and ranked No. 8 in the Meta UFC bantamweight rankings as of Sept. 26, the night he headlined against Raoni Barcelos and won after Barcelos was knocked unconscious by a takedown in Round 5. That earned Fight of the Night. Afterward in Rome, he thanked Covington for taking the match and repeated that his main goal is becoming the youngest champion in UFC history. Bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili reacted on X with “bantamweight power,” which I’ll take as a friendly note from the top of the division.
I wouldn’t overread one grappling match into a title argument. I would note that the takedown-into-scramble-into-finish sequence is the same one that has been winning him MMA fights, and it worked against a far bigger, far more credentialed wrestler.
View post on X
For Covington, the RAF record and the belt are untouched, because this happened under different rules. The loss does expose a specific hole, and he gets two very public chances in the next seven weeks to show whether he’s patched it.
One side note from ringside: Conor McGregor was in attendance, and a clip circulated on X of him laughing after the finish. McGregor responded on X that the clip was false and edited, that the laugh came from a different point in the show, and wrote, “I do not laugh at competing men and women. I respect them!” Both fighters referenced him after the match, according to Bloody Elbow.
Rosas doesn’t get much time to enjoy it. He makes his RAF debut against Clay Guida at RAF 15 on Nov. 28, which means the guy who volunteered from the audience on a Sunday will have wrestled on two continents’ worth of cards inside four weeks.
