Raul Rosas Jr. walked into the main event of Hype FC’s submission-only show in Rome on November 3 as a short-notice replacement for Dillon Danis, and he walked out 40 seconds later with Colby Covington’s tap. Takedown, back, rear-naked choke. Roy Nelson clocked it at 43 seconds on X. I’ll let the timekeepers fight over three seconds, because the sequence itself is the story, and it’s the most efficient demolition of a wrestling-first grappling identity I’ve seen in a long time.
My argument is simple. The style Covington built his reputation on treats the takedown and the top position as the finish line. You get there, you stay there, you win. Modern submission grappling treats every position as a door to the next one, and every scramble as a chance to attack. When those two philosophies meet with no judges, no points and no clock to protect anybody, the second one eats the first one. Rosas didn’t need a round, a reset or a single minute to prove it.
The takedown was the part Covington was supposed to own
Here’s what should bother Covington’s camp most. According to Essentially Sports, Rosas opened the match by taking Covington down. Covington is the reigning Real American Freestyle cruiserweight champion, 5-0 in that promotion, and he beat Arman Tsarukyan to win the belt. That division has a 190-pound limit. Rosas fights at 135. Dovy Simu put the gap at 30 pounds on X, Essentially Sports figured it at 35 using Covington’s old welterweight limit and higher using the RAF number. Pick whichever figure you like. A bantamweight got the takedown on a heavier man whose whole brand is wrestling.
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Then came the part that actually decides grappling matches without points. Rosas didn’t settle on top and admire the view. He went straight to the back and sank the choke. That transition is the whole thesis in one motion. A top-control wrestler who lands on bottom thinks about getting up. A submission grappler on top thinks about where the opponent’s neck will be when he tries to get up. Covington, by every account of the finish, had no answer once the hooks and the arm were there.
The best counterargument, and why it doesn’t hold
The strongest pushback is Covington’s own. After the match he said, in a clip HappyPunch posted, “This is the first time I’ve done any jiu jitsu in years.” He’s prepping for a freestyle wrestling match, the ruleset was foreign, so why read anything into it?
Because that excuse is the indictment. A grappling system that only functions when the ruleset removes the submission threat has a hole in it, and Covington just told us he hasn’t trained to fill that hole in years. Freestyle and folkstyle-flavored top control can afford to give up the back for a moment because nobody’s allowed to choke you there. Rosas grew up in a game where the back is the most dangerous real estate on the mat. One of those approaches transfers to any ruleset with chokes in it. The other one needs protection. And remember, the takedown happened in a phase that freestyle actually rewards. Covington lost the exchange he trains for before he lost the one he doesn’t.
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The history doesn’t help him either. Essentially Sports noted Rosas is only the second person to submit Covington, after Warlley Alves at UFC 194 in 2015. That’s a long stretch where his top-heavy game held up, mostly because he was the one choosing where the fight went. On Tuesday a 22-year-old bantamweight chose for him.
Rosas is the right messenger
Rosas made history as the youngest fighter to debut in the UFC, submitting Jay Perrin in Round 1 at UFC 282 when he was 18. He’s 7-1 in the UFC now, and his last outing was a fifth-round finish of Raoni Barcelos in a September 26 main event, with Barcelos losing consciousness on a slam. That’s a kid who wrestles and submits as one continuous thought, which is exactly how the modern game is built. He doesn’t separate the shot from the finish. Covington’s generation was taught to.
The reactions sorted themselves predictably. Merab Dvalishvili, who knows a thing about what bantamweight wrestlers can do to bigger men, wrote “bantamweight power” on X. A clip of Conor McGregor laughing ringside went viral, though McGregor wrote on X that the clip was “false and fully edited” and that its placement after the finish was misleading. He added, “I do not laugh at competing men and women. I respect them!” Fair enough. The choke was funny enough without him.
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What happens next
Covington now flies to Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi to defend his RAF belt against Khamzat Chimaev on November 14, and the ruleset will shelter him from chokes for one night. It won’t shelter him from the takedown question. If a 135-pounder got him to the mat in Rome, Chimaev, a bigger man who has gone 4-0 in RAF and who said he was “Happy to finally get his guy and break his neck,” will have watched the tape twice by breakfast.
My pick: Chimaev, and it won’t be close. Rosas, meanwhile, makes his RAF debut against Clay Guida on November 28. Guida has wrestled for his whole career. I’d tell him to keep his chin tucked.
