Hernandez vs Rodrigues: the control-time case, and its flaw

Since the start of 2015, exactly one UFC middleweight has spent a larger share of his fighting time in control of another human being than Anthony Hernandez, and that man is Khamzat Chimaev.

That is the whole reason this fight is interesting to me, so let me put the number down before I do anything else with it. Across 12 UFC fights at 185 pounds, Hernandez has fought for 137 minutes and 5 seconds of official cage time and held control position for 71 minutes and 45 seconds of it. That is 52.3 percent. Chimaev's rate is higher, at 60.6 percent, off six fights and 75 minutes. Nobody else with a real sample is close.

(UFC middleweight bouts since January 2015, minimum six fights and 60 minutes of cage time, from our per-fight stats.)

On Saturday he headlines UFC Fight Night in Sacramento against Gregory Rodrigues, which is the first UFC card at Golden 1 Center since July 14, 2019. Hernandez was born in Oakland, 80 miles down the freeway. He is ranked seventh at middleweight; Rodrigues is tenth.

What 52 percent actually looks like

Control rate is one of those statistics that flattens a fight into a percentage and loses the texture, so here is the texture.

In October 2024, Hernandez took Michel Pereira down 10 times in a five round main event and held him for 15 minutes and 42 seconds before stopping him in the fifth. That is more control time in one night than most middleweights accumulate in three fights.

In February 2025 he took Brendan Allen down four times and controlled him for 10 minutes and 22 seconds over three rounds, which is 69 percent of a fifteen minute fight against a man who had gone 7-1 in his previous eight.

In August 2025 he put Roman Dolidze, who is also on Saturday's card, on the mat nine times out of eleven attempts and submitted him in the fourth.

The career line: 54 takedowns landed on 112 attempts, 15 submission attempts, five Performance of the Night bonuses in his last nine appearances. He has never scored a knockdown in the UFC. He does not need to. The pattern is that he closes distance, gets a body lock, and then the fight stops being a fight and starts being a commute.

The two nights it did not work

Here is the part that the control-rate table cannot show you, and it is the reason I do not think this is a formality.

Hernandez has lost twice since 2019. Both were knockouts, and in both of them his grappling never got a chance to exist.

Kevin Holland knocked him out in 39 seconds in May 2020. Zero takedown attempts, zero seconds of control, because the fight was over before there was anything to attempt.

Sean Strickland knocked him out in the third round this February. Hernandez attempted one takedown all night and did not get it. He finished with 32 seconds of control across two and a half rounds, landed 55 significant strikes, absorbed 110, and got dropped before the stoppage at 2:23 of round three. Take the body lock away and what is left is a middleweight who has been out-struck two to one.

That is the blueprint, and it is not a subtle one: stay off the fence, make him strike, land something hard while he is trying to get inside.

Rodrigues has the tools, and the receipts

Photo: Show Me The Money / CC BY 3.0

Rodrigues is 10-3 in the UFC with seven knockouts, and the raw damage numbers are the best on the card. He has scored eight knockdowns in 13 fights, which is the most of any fighter on Saturday's card and twice as many as the next man on it.

He also has the defensive record that makes the matchup awkward for a grappler. In 13 UFC fights, opponents have attempted a total of 12 takedowns against him and landed three, which is 75 percent defense. More telling than the percentage is the raw count. Twelve attempts in 13 fights means most of the middleweight division has looked at Rodrigues and decided to keep the fight standing. Across all 13 of those fights, he has spent 8 minutes and 5 seconds on the wrong end of control position, total, which is less time than Hernandez took off Michel Pereira on a single Saturday.

He is on a three fight run, and the most recent one is the one I keep going back to. In January 2023, Brunno Ferreira knocked Rodrigues out in the first round. In March of this year, Rodrigues knocked Ferreira out in the first round and took a Performance of the Night bonus for it. In between he stopped Jack Hermansson in a round and out-pointed Roman Kopylov over three.

He has been finished twice himself: by Ferreira, and by Jared Cannonier in the fourth round of a Fight of the Night in February 2025. Six bonus checks in 13 fights is not an accident. Rodrigues fights the exact kind of fight that has ended Hernandez's nights.

Nine point three against twelve

Here is the collision in one line.

Hernandez averages 9.3 takedown attempts per UFC fight. Rodrigues has faced 12 takedown attempts in his entire UFC career.

If Saturday looks anything like a normal Hernandez night, Rodrigues will be asked to defend more takedowns in twenty five minutes than he has been asked to defend in five years and 13 fights. There is no way to know how a takedown defense record built on twelve data points holds up under that, because it has never been tested. Seventy five percent of twelve is not the same claim as seventy five percent of eighty.

The striking side is not ambiguous at all. Rodrigues lands 5.5 significant strikes per minute and absorbs 4.7. Hernandez lands 4.5 and absorbs 3.1. Rodrigues is the harder, faster, more damaging striker by every count we have, and the eight knockdowns say the difference is not cosmetic.

So the fight is a straight referendum: can Hernandez get to the body lock before Rodrigues lands the thing that has ended eight opponents' evenings, and if he does, does a takedown defense number built on almost no attempts mean anything at all.

What the market thinks

Across 24 books, Hernandez opened at a consensus of -167 and sits at -168. Rodrigues opened +135 and sits +138. Four days out, nothing has moved. That is the market saying it looked at both of the above arguments and could not separate them either, which is a more honest verdict than most main events get.

I lean Hernandez, and I want to be plain about why: 52.3 percent over 137 minutes is not a fluke of matchmaking, and the men who have solved it did so with a punch that landed in the first exchange rather than with a plan that survived four rounds. But the plan does not have to survive four rounds. It has to survive one clean right hand, and Rodrigues has thrown eight of those that put people on the floor.

Hernandez has spent five years turning opponents into furniture. Saturday he does it 80 miles from where he was born, in a building the UFC has not visited in seven years, against the one man on the roster who has barely been asked to defend a takedown because nobody thought it was worth trying.

Somebody is going to be very wrong about which of those facts matters more.