Fast facts
- Division: Middleweight (UFC)
- Record: 15-4
- Nationality: United States (born in Dunnigan, California, into a Mexican family)
- Team/gym: MMA Gold Fight Team
- Notable wins: Rodolfo Vieira, Michel Pereira, Brendan Allen (twice), Roman Dolidze, Roman Kopylov, Edmen Shahbazyan
The man who ended Anthony Hernandez’s eight-fight win streak spent this week showing him around Canada. Sean Strickland, who stopped Hernandez by TKO in Round 3 at UFC Fight Night 267 in February and has since become middleweight champion, was in Edmonton cornering ahead of Saturday’s card, and Hernandez tagged along. In a clip shared by @Home_of_Fight, Hernandez described how the friendship played out on the street: “I knew he was out here cornering, and he said let’s go enjoy Canada.” Then, the punchline: “This fcker is out here getting chased by twekers, we accidentally inhaled cr*ck walking down the street.”
Strickland reposted it on X with his own review of the bodyguard work. “Fluffy was keeping me real safe!” he wrote. UFC Canada, meanwhile, posted a thank-you to the Edmonton Oilers for hosting Hernandez. It’s a funny week. It’s also a strange place for a fighter who, a year ago, looked like he was walking straight into a title conversation, and who turns 33 on October 18.
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Dunnigan, a wrestling room, and a lost spot on the team
Hernandez was born in Dunnigan, California, a small farm town up Interstate 5 from Sacramento, and graduated from Woodland High School in 2011. He wrestled there until his grades got him kicked off the team, which is the kind of detail that tends to disappear from highlight packages and probably shouldn’t. He tried college for a short stretch, then left to fight.
He’d already started. His amateur debut came in 2010 at Ring of Fire 1, a decision over Michael Green Jr., and he strung together eight straight wins before losing a King of the Cage amateur middleweight title fight to Justin Jones by first-round submission. He turned pro in 2014 and worked through Global Knockout and Legacy Fighting Alliance.
The year 2018 is the one to sit with. His father died of lung disease in March. In a June interview that year, Hernandez called his late father his best friend. Later in 2018, at LFA 32, he beat Brendan Allen by unanimous decision for the LFA middleweight title. Then came Dana White’s Contender Series, where he knocked out Jordan Wright in 40 seconds and had it erased. A positive test for marijuana turned the win into a no contest, cost him 15% of his purse and earned him a six-month suspension.
The slow start
The UFC got him anyway, and the early returns were rough. Markus Perez caught him with an anaconda choke in Round 2 of his debut at UFC Fight Night 144 in February 2019. He answered by submitting Jun Yong Park with the same choke that August. Then Kevin Holland finished him in 39 seconds at UFC on ESPN 8 in May 2020.
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That put him at 1-2 in the UFC heading into a booking with Rodolfo Vieira, a five-time jiu-jitsu world champion, at UFC 258 in February 2021. Hernandez choked him out with a guillotine in Round 2. Grappling the grappler and winning was a huge upset, and the outlets agreed: Cageside Press, Jitsmagazine, Combat Press and MMA Sucka all named it their 2021 Submission of the Year, and UFC.com ranked it second for both submission and upset of the year. It also earned him his first Performance of the Night bonus.
What followed was a run of injuries and withdrawals that would’ve stalled a lot of careers. He pulled out of a Punahele Soriano fight with an injury, left a Dustin Stoltzfus booking for undisclosed reasons, and later missed a Chris Curtis date (which became Roman Kopylov) with a torn ligament. When he did make it to the cage, he kept winning: Josh Fremd by decision, Marc-André Barriault by Round 3 submission, Edmen Shahbazyan by Round 3 TKO, and then Kopylov by rear-naked choke in Round 2 at UFC 298, another Performance of the Night.
What fighting Hernandez actually feels like
The numbers read like a scouting report written by someone who got sore just watching. Hernandez owns the most takedowns in UFC middleweight history at 57. He’s second all time in division control time at 1:22:25, behind only Chael Sonnen. He’s also third in significant strike accuracy at 60.1%, which is the stat that tells you the pressure isn’t blind.
The Michel Pereira fight in October 2024 is the purest version. Hernandez attempted 29 takedowns, landed 97 significant ground strikes and finished with a +128 striking differential, all division records, before the stoppage came at 2:22 of Round 5, the latest knockout in a UFC middleweight bout. Sherdog called it the 2024 Beatdown of the Year. A year later Sherdog gave him the same award for the Roman Dolidze main event at UFC on ESPN 72, which ended with a rear-naked choke in Round 4 and another bonus. In between, he beat Allen a second time, by unanimous decision at UFC Fight Night 252 in February 2025.
That Dolidze win made it eight straight, tying Robert Whittaker and Yoel Romero for the fifth-longest streak in middleweight history. A scheduled fight with Reinier de Ridder on his birthday last October fell through when Hernandez got hurt, and Allen took the spot.
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Where it turned
Strickland was the jump in competition, and in February he answered it with a Round 3 TKO. In August, Gregory Rodrigues, another former LFA middleweight champion, beat him by unanimous decision in the main event of UFC Fight Night 285. The consolation was real money: his first Fight of the Night, worth $100,000.
The current UFC Meta Rankings have him at No. 8, one spot behind Rodrigues. Knockout Daily’s Cagefile data has him lower, at No. 10. Either way, the view from there is a little galling. Allen, the man Hernandez beat for a regional title in 2018 and again in the UFC last year, just moved up to No. 4 after submitting Christian Leroy Duncan in Round 5, and MMA Fighting reported that his recent losses to Hernandez and Nassourdine Imavov have left matchmakers unsure what to do with him. Rodrigues, meanwhile, is the guy Whittaker pitched on his MMArcade Podcast as a slugfest opponent for Dricus du Plessis.
The top of the division is frozen while Strickland airs his compensation grievances with the UFC, according to MMA Fighting, and Hernandez has no next fight named in any reporting so far. Two straight losses to elite opposition don’t erase what he built over eight fights, and the style that produced 57 takedowns doesn’t expire at 33. My take: a ranked grappler with something to prove (Ikram Aliskerov, the No. 10 Meta-ranked name whose 2024 fight with Hernandez never happened, would be a good place to start) is exactly the right test. Until then, he’s in Edmonton for Saturday’s card at Rogers Place, keeping the champion safe on the walk through the park.
