Raul Rosas Jr. spent part of his weekend in a college football locker room, delivering a pregame pump-up speech to the UNLV Rebels before they took the field against the North Dakota State Bison.
The video went around X late Saturday. Spinnin Backfist posted it with the caption “LEAKED: Raul Rosas Jr. pump up speech to UNLV before their game today.” That’s a generous use of the word leaked, since the UFC’s own content account, @ufcontnt, was busy sharing footage from the same night. That clip showed Rosas running out with Rebels head coach Dan Mullen and the team before kickoff.
The UFC’s post carried the #UFCVegas122 tag and a plug for the TNT Sports stream on HBO Max. The promotion wasn’t hiding its involvement. Rosas in a football tunnel next to a Power Five-caliber head coach is the kind of crossover content the company loves on a fight weekend, and the card that night was headlined by Christian Leroy Duncan.
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The footage doesn’t need much explaining. A bantamweight stood in front of a full football roster, got them loud, and then sprinted out with them like he was going to play special teams.
Where Rosas stands
Rosas came into the public eye young, and the fight media hasn’t let anyone forget it. MMA Fighting’s Morning Report this week ran an Instagram post with the line “I swear he was 17-year-old Raul Rosas Jr. not so long ago,” which tells you how fast the kid from the early hype videos has turned into a guy giving speeches to college athletes.
His most recent fight is still fresh. Raoni Barcelos turned up at UFC Vegas 122 the same night, and Home of Fight posted that the Brazilian veteran looked healthy and happy with his family only a few weeks after what it called a health scare in his bout with Rosas. Seeing Barcelos in the building with his family was the best news to come out of that fight, whatever you thought of how it unfolded.
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Nothing in the posts from the weekend pointed to Rosas’ next booking. No opponent was mentioned, and neither clip had a date attached.
Quick take
I’ll take this over another cryptic emoji announcement any day. Rosas has always been a guy who says what he’s thinking, and putting him in front of a locker room full of 20-year-olds who hit people for a living is about as natural a fit as the UFC’s social team could find. The only thing missing from the clip is the score. Somebody in that UNLV locker room should be texting Rosas the final, and if the Rebels handled North Dakota State, Mullen might want him back for the next home game.
