ROSAS JR. CHOKES OUT COVINGTON IN 43 SECONDS IN ROME
Raul Rosas Jr. took the Hype Italy main event on days notice and submitted Colby Covington with a rear-naked choke before the first minute was gone.
Colby Covington finally got his Hype debut in Rome. It lasted 43 seconds.
Raul Rosas Jr. submitted the former UFC interim welterweight champion with a rear-naked choke in the main event of Hype Italy at the PalaPellicone on Tuesday, in a submission-only grappling match scheduled for one 10-minute round. The 22-year-old UFC bantamweight was not even supposed to be there.
Covington was booked against Dillon Danis. Danis withdrew days before the event, Hype CEO Armand Martirosian announced the pullout at Sunday press conference, and Rosas Jr. — sitting in the audience — volunteered to take the match on days notice. Veshap covered the switch on Monday. On Tuesday, the replacement won it in under a minute.
Rosas Jr. closed the distance immediately, put the much bigger man down with an early takedown, took his back in the transition and locked the rear-naked choke. Covington, an NCAA Division I All-American wrestler and the RAF Cruiserweight Crossover champion, had no answer. He tapped at 0:43.
At ringside, Conor McGregor — a teammate of Danis and a special guest at the show — was shown laughing at the result.
Covington said afterwards that he started slowly and had been focused on wrestling rather than jiu-jitsu, noting he had not trained pure grappling in years. He offered no excuses, and he does not have much time to dwell on it: in 11 days, on November 14 in Abu Dhabi, he defends the RAF Cruiserweight Crossover Championship against Khamzat Chimaev.
Rosas Jr., meanwhile, keeps stacking wins. The Rome submission extends a run that includes a six-fight MMA win streak, and he is set to meet Clay Guida at RAF 15 later this month. A bantamweight just choked out a former welterweight champion in 43 seconds — on a match he took from a seat in the crowd.
