Back When RAF 9 Went Down: A Sitting UFC Champion, An Olympic Gold Medalist, And A Hall of Famer All Showed Up In Arlington

2026, to be exact — it marked one of those moments in combat sports where you had to actually stop and process what was happening. College Park Center at the University of Texas at Arlington hosted RAF 9, and the card that night represented something the freestyle wrestling world had been chasing for decades: legitimacy on a mainstream stage, backed by names that even casual MMA fans would recognize.

Merab Dvalishvili, the reigning UFC Bantamweight Champion with a UFC record of 119 career takedowns — the most anyone has ever accumulated in that organization — stepped onto a freestyle wrestling mat to face Frankie Edgar. Not in the UFC Octagon. Not under Dana White's watch in the traditional sense. But with the UFC's explicit blessing, which is the part that still matters when you say it out loud.

The fact that the UFC approved this deserves its own paragraph, because it represents a genuine shift in how the sport's biggest organization handles its talent. For years, Dana White has operated under a philosophy that his fighters compete for the UFC or they compete for nobody else — at least not on any platform that might develop them as attractions. The octagon was the only stage. Everything else was off-limits without permission.

Until Dvalishvili.

Here's where the coherence of the UFC's decision becomes interesting. They'd said no to Arman Tsarukyan facing Colby Covington on this same RAF card, pulling the matchup before it ever got official announcement. Two active UFC fighters on someone else's broadcast violated the principle. But Edgar hadn't competed in the UFC since 2022. He was already in the Hall of Fame. He was 44 years old. He wasn't on any contract the UFC was currently protecting. He was, in practical terms, a historical figure. So the bantamweight champion could face him. The champion could go wrestle.

That decision — to allow a sitting champion to compete in a different sport for a different promotion — hadn't happened in this era of UFC dominance. When you control your athletes the way White controls his, you don't let them do this. Except now they did.

The Hall of Famer Who Should Have Retired But Didn't

Frankie Edgar was a Division I wrestler at Penn State before MMA ever became his calling. He holds the UFC Lightweight Championship. He spent his entire career accepting fights in weight classes that were legitimately too big for his frame, and he won more often than basic physics should have allowed. He was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame. He was 44 years old when RAF 9 happened.

And he was about to face the current UFC Bantamweight Champion in freestyle wrestling, the sport of his youth, at a college arena in Texas.

This was quintessential Frankie Edgar, and if you've watched his career, that sentence explains everything you need to know about why he agreed to this. The man who'd spent his entire MMA run refusing to acknowledge the weight disadvantage he carried into every single fight — the undersized killer who'd make it work anyway — was now refusing to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, 44 is too old to be stepping into this kind of competition against the best grappler in his former division.

Edgar didn't get the memo that retirement was supposed to mean something. He was going to wrestle Merab Dvalishvili because Edgar doesn't do quiet endings. His career was built on contradicting everyone's expectations about what his body could do, and apparently that part hadn't changed just because he'd been out of the UFC for four years.

The outcome matrix here is perfect television either way. If Edgar pulled it off — if the 44-year-old Hall of Famer somehow beat the sitting UFC champion in that champion's sport — you'd have one of the best underdog stories the combat sports world could produce. If Dvalishvili won, you'd have a current champion getting a clean victory over a legendary fighter on that legendary fighter's home terrain. Both narratives work. Neither one is boring. And boring is something that never existed in any version of Frankie Edgar's biography anyway.

The Olympic Champion Waiting for His UFC Moment

Gable Steveson won Olympic gold at the 2020 Tokyo Games. He was a two-time NCAA wrestling champion at Minnesota. He'd compiled a 3-0 record in MMA, and all three victories came by finish — which means the wrestling translated cleanly when it needed to.

Since around 2022, Steveson had been "about to sign with the UFC." That was the perpetual headline. That was the ongoing narrative.

Instead, he'd spent those years in the NFL with the Minnesota Vikings, then in WWE, and now competing in RAF under a multi-match deal. On May 30, he faced Alexandr Romanov, the heavyweight who'd gone 7-3 in the UFC before getting cut in 2024. Romanov was, by a significant margin, the toughest test Steveson had faced in this sport.

Steveson was treating RAF as a paid audition tape. Every win built his case for that UFC contract that kept getting delayed. His first two RAF matches had gone smoothly — the wrestling elite crushing opponents who were good but not elite. This one was different. Romanov could actually push back. Romanov could expose gaps if they existed.

Whatever happened on May 30 would tell the actual story about where Steveson was as a fighter. Not the "potential" version. Not the "future" version. The real one. A win against Romanov keeps the UFC audition tape looking clean. A loss changes the entire conversation about when — or if — that UFC signing actually happens.

The waiting game for Steveson's octagon debut continues after RAF 9, but at least the evidence from this card would be concrete.

The Undercard That Told Its Own Stories

Colby Covington made his third RAF appearance on this card, facing Chris Weidman, the former middleweight champion who'd dethroned Anderson Silva twice. Covington had promised it would be "a long night" for Weidman. Weidman responded with silence, which, somehow, was the exactly right call. In the sport's universe where Covington thrives on noise and reaction, Weidman's refusal to engage landed harder than any comeback he could have posted. It was the anti-Covington move, and it worked.

Arman Tsarukyan was making his fifth RAF appearance in five months — a pace that would leave most fighters dizzy and wondering if they'd made a career mistake. Tsarukyan seemed fine with it. He faced Keelon Jimison at 175 pounds, treating RAF like a second job that paid better than his first one.

Ridge Lovett, fresh off a Big 12 wrestling championship, faced Bajrang Punia, an Indian Olympian with a shelf full of world and Asian championship medals. It was, objectively, the best pure wrestling match on the entire card. It was also guaranteed to get the least mainstream attention, because that's how these events always work: the purest technical wrestling gets buried under the MMA names and the stories.

Nine Months Old and Actually Breaking Through

Real American Freestyle launched on August 30, 2025, with RAF 01 in Cleveland. Hulk Hogan, one of the co-founders, had died in July 2025, before that first event ever happened. The promotion opened with a tribute to him and moved forward.

Chad Bronstein and Terri Francis built the operation with Ben Askren on matchmaking, Chael Sonnen on commentary, and Fox Nation handling the broadcast. Nine months after that first card, RAF had booked a sitting UFC champion, a two-time NCAA champion and Olympic gold medalist, a UFC Hall of Famer who refused to stay retired, and enough MMA crossover talent that a first-time viewer would need a stadium program just to figure out what sport they were actually watching.

Professional freestyle wrestling in America had spent three decades saying "we're about to break through." It kept not breaking through. Every cycle brought new promoters, new networks, new promises. None of them stuck. The sport remained a niche product, brilliant to its audience, invisible to everyone else.

RAF had been running for nine months. And it was actually doing what everyone else had promised to do.

On May 30, 2026, a UFC champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and a Hall of Famer walked into Arlington. The promotion that booked all three had only existed since August 2025. That's not a coincidence. That's execution. That's what happens when you book names people recognize while building infrastructure that actually works.

The wrestling world had been waiting for this moment. RAF just made it real.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• Merab Dvalishvili vs. Frankie Edgar Added To RAF 09 — Cageside Press
• Olympic Champion Gable Steveson, Chris Weidman to Make Debuts at RAF 09 — The Mat / USA Wrestling
• Arman Tsarukyan Booked for 5th RAF Match in 5 Months at RAF 9 vs. Keelon Jimison — Yahoo Sports
• Colby Covington: Chris Weidman Matchup a Done Deal for RAF 9 — Sherdog
• Real American Freestyle — Official Site