Dillon Danis is out of his submission grappling match with Colby Covington, and Raul Rosas Jr. is in. Championship Rounds broke the swap on X on Sunday, and Bloody Elbow confirmed that Rosas Jr. will now face Covington in the Hype FC main event Tuesday at the PalaPellicone in Rome. MMA Mania put the turnaround at three days’ notice. None of the reports gave a reason for Danis pulling out.
This was supposed to be a sequel. Covington beat Danis on the Real American Freestyle mat back in March, and 2026 has been rough on Danis since then. He also dropped RAF matches to Khamzat Chimaev and Arman Tsarukyan. A rematch with Covington in Italy was his shot at stopping the bleeding. Instead he’s sitting this one out, and Hype FC had to scramble for a headliner.
Covington, 38, has stayed busy since announcing his UFC retirement. The former interim UFC welterweight champion holds the RAF cruiserweight crossover title and signed with Hype FC for submission-only contests. He’s also still talking, because of course he is. In an interview with MMA Junkie on Friday, Covington defended Islam Makhachev’s decision to pass on Carlos Prates and argued that the Prates vs. Michael Morales fight set for UFC 336 doesn’t deserve to be for an interim title. “Michael Morales has fought nobody,” Covington said. MMA Mania’s Midnight Mania roundup fired back by calling him one of the biggest duckers of all time, which is a funny thing to read two days before his own opponent vanished.
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Rosas Jr. shows up with real momentum. He’s the No. 8-ranked UFC bantamweight, and in September he won his first Octagon main event against Raoni Barcelos. Before that, according to Bloody Elbow, he submitted the brother of Zabit Magomedsharipov at ACBJJ 21. He also knows the Hype FC room. He went the distance with former UFC flyweight champion Deiveson Figueiredo under that banner in a match ruled a draw.
Give Rosas Jr. his flowers right now. A ranked bantamweight agreeing on a couple days’ notice to roll with a former welterweight who currently holds a cruiserweight crossover belt is the exact energy I want from young fighters on the rise: somebody calls, you say yes, you get on the plane. The size gap is ridiculous, and that cuts both ways. If Covington can’t hold down a 135er and grind him out, the jokes write themselves for weeks. If Rosas Jr. catches something in a scramble, he walks out of Rome with the biggest name on his grappling resume. As for Danis, three straight losses on the mat in one year and now a late withdrawal is a tough stretch for a guy whose whole brand is jiu-jitsu. Tuesday night in Rome, a bantamweight finds out exactly how heavy Colby Covington really is.
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