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Anthony “Fluffy” Hernandez fought this past weekend. He’s everyone’s favorite dark horse middleweight contender but this past week he looked pedestrian. Today we’re going to explain how his opponent stunted Fluffy’s usual destructive offense.

In the premium notebook we take a look at the return of professional grappling star, Nick Rodriguez.

Now let’s get into it.

Anthony “Fluffy” Hernandez has been a hardcore fan favorite for the past few years. Whatever lack of size or athleticism he might have is more than made up for by his pace and aggression.

Fluffy doesn’t really fight foes. He melts men with in your face wrestling, ground and pound, and chokes that all feed into one another. Pretty much every Fluffy fight looks like this below👇.

Gritty. Messy. Murderous. That’s what Fluffy’s six fight winning streak looked like going into this past weekend’s rematch against Brendan Allen, a gigantic Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt.

Allen had lost his last fight before taking on Fluffy. Before that he was on a six fight winning streak with five rear naked chokes. He is absolutely smothering when he gets on top.

Allen is a specialist and if you want to read about what makes him a special jiujitsu player click here for an older article I wrote on him.

In this rematch, Allen made Fluffy look more human. He pretty much completely neutralized Fluffy’s usual onslaught.

How? With a lot of clever wrist control.

The thing with Fluffy’s game is he rides cross body a lot. To do that, he has to commit an arm to holding his opponent’s far side. That only leaves him with one free hand to punch. Allen only has to mind that one free hand and he can essentially stop Fluffy’s onslaught.

Allen had several opportunities for a lot more success against Fluffy. There were several key instances where he could have used the octopus position to turn back into Fluffy and sweep, or at least make space to get back to his feet.

Here is an example of the octopus done well from Khabib Nurmagomedov.

To be fair it’s not like Fluffy was completely unable to strike. He got his rhythm going towards the end of the second round.

So why was this sequence different? First of all Fluffy is in top half. That means he’s sitting on Allen’s hips and has both hands free to punch. And I really really don’t want to sound like an arm chair quarterback here, but going to half guard is a no brainer to round out Fluffy’s ground and pound game.

In the last round we saw another staple of Fluffy’s MMA grappling. Using cradles to hold Allen in place.

Earlier in this fight and in another card we were even treated to some slick wall wrestling.

Trips along the fence and more judo based wall wall wrestling was my technical trend to watch in 2025. I think it’s probably going to be a recurring theme in this newsletter for a while. Watch how Fluffy gets his feet in action to take down Allen when the action looks like it’s been slowed.

Earlier in the card Jean Matsumoto kept Rob Font stuck to the floor with a sneaky trip.

Font and Matsumoto had an excellent scrap for the full 15 minutes. I thought they should have been awarded Fight of the Night. Whatever you think about the decision, Matsumoto is certainly one to watch in the division.

This coming week’s UFC card is kind of meh. Not a lot of grapplers nor interesting prospects other than Kazakhstan’s flyweight stud, Asu Almabayev. You can read about him here.

Before we get out of here today, I want to take a look at an upcoming grappling event. UFC’s FPI 10 is in less than two weeks and the headlining match features Nick Rodriguez vs Victor Hugo.

Rodriguez is one of the biggest names in professional grappling. He’s won silver at the ADCC World Championships twice and he was the inaugural Craig Jones Invitational winner. And while Rodriguez is on top of the grappling world you can’t feel good about his chances against Hugo.