Colby Covington still has a grappling match in Rome. The man across from him has changed. Hype has confirmed that Raul Rosas Jr. will replace Dillon Danis opposite the former UFC interim champion, MiddleEasy reported Tuesday. The new pairing landed after Danis withdrew from the Hype Italy event.
Word of the switch first surfaced Sunday, when Championship Rounds posted on X that Danis had pulled out of the match and that Rosas Jr. would step in. DAZN ran several pieces on the change, including one promising to explain why Rosas Jr. is taking Danis’s place and another laying out the rules for the bout. The sources available to us don’t spell out either of those things, so the reason for Danis’s exit and the exact ruleset aren’t confirmed here. Boxingnews.com also framed it as a grappling event, which is the one detail everybody agrees on.
The timing makes this a strange, busy month for Covington. According to MMA Fighting, he is scheduled to face Khamzat Chimaev in the main event of RAF Abu Dhabi on Nov. 14. That means the veteran welterweight is stacking two grappling dates inside a few weeks, against two very different opponents, while his MMA career sits on the shelf.
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The Chimaev booking adds a wrinkle to the Danis withdrawal. Chimaev has wrestled four times for RAF since losing the UFC middleweight title to Sean Strickland at UFC 328 in May, and Danis was one of the men he beat, alongside Robbie Lawler, Tyron Woodley and Gilbert Burns. So Covington was set to face a grappler Chimaev had already handled, right before facing Chimaev himself. Now he gets Rosas Jr., a fighter DAZN referred to as a UFC star in its coverage of the replacement.
Chimaev isn’t slowing down either. ALF League announced that he’ll headline its first event against Jorge Masvidal in a submission-only match on Dec. 4 at The Agenda in Dubai. Covington, meanwhile, has kept his mouth running in the gaps between bookings. On Submission Radio he challenged Islam Makhachev to a $100,000 charity padel match, with each man picking a professional partner, and he told Bloody Elbow that Makhachev may never fight again after using retirement as a negotiating tactic.
My quick take: this is a better matchup than the one it replaced. Danis gave the event a familiar villain and a lot of noise, but Rosas Jr. brings something harder to manufacture, a young fighter who actually wants to scramble with a name like Covington’s and has nothing to lose by trying. Covington has spent years selling himself as the wrestler nobody wants to grapple with. In Rome he gets a kid who apparently said yes on short notice, and then he flies to Abu Dhabi to see Chimaev on Nov. 14.
