UFC Sacramento: Rodrigues Stuffed 25 Takedowns and Took Hernandez's Leg Apart

Anthony Hernandez headlined UFC Sacramento at home on Saturday August 22 as the ranked man, the favourite and the local hero. He left the Golden 1 Center on crutches, beaten on all three scorecards by Gregory Rodrigues. The Brazilian turned away 25 of 28 takedown attempts, chopped the lead leg until it stopped holding weight, and then needed a wheelchair himself to get through the rest of the night. Here is how the upset was actually built.

Key takeaways

Twenty-eight takedown attempts, three that landed

The plan was never a secret

Anthony Hernandez did not arrive with a disguise. He is a grappler who drowns people, he had built an eight-fight winning streak on exactly that, and everyone in the building knew the fight would live or die on whether he could put Gregory Rodrigues on his back. He tried twenty-eight times. He got there three times.

That number is the whole story. Twenty-five stuffed takedowns across twenty-five minutes is not luck and it is not one good sprawl; it is a man who spent the camp preparing for the only thing his opponent was going to do. Rodrigues met the shots with his hips, punished the entries on the way out, and made Hernandez pay a fee every single time he reached.

Then he went to work on the leg

Stopping a wrestler is defence. Rodrigues wanted more than that. From the second round he started hammering the calf, and the effect was immediate: a leg kick dropped Hernandez, then another one did it again. Rodrigues took full mount off the second knockdown and unloaded before Hernandez could recover the position.

By the championship rounds the lead leg had stopped working. Rodrigues kept returning to it, landed a heavy right hand and a long combination in the fourth, and put Hernandez down with another calf kick in the fifth. Across the fight, kicks alone sent the local man to the floor four times.

Hernandez did not disappear

The scorecards say 48-47 twice for a reason. Hernandez took Rodrigues down ten seconds into the third round, climbed onto his back and battered him there for most of the round. He closed the second and the fourth with takedowns of his own. His corner told him he needed a finish in the fifth, which is the most honest read anybody offered all night.

He simply could not hold what he took. Rodrigues got back to his feet each time, and standing up was enough, because standing up is where the leg kicks lived.

They won the bonus and lost the night

A wheelchair for the winner

The picture after the fight said more than the scorecards. Gregory Rodrigues was in a wheelchair on the post-fight show, his right foot in a walking boot, and he had to fight his way up three steps to reach the microphone at the press conference. Anthony Hernandez was on crutches. Twenty-five minutes of kicking a man’s leg turns out to cost the kicker something too.

Dana White gave the main event the Fight of the Night bonus, which was the only possible call. The Performance of the Night awards went to MarQuel Mederos, who stopped Mason Jones in the second round, and to Carli Judice, who finished Jeisla Chaves with a body kick in ninety-nine seconds.

Hernandez says the gloves were grabbed

Hernandez did not take the loss quietly. He accused Rodrigues of cheating, specifically of grabbing the inside of his gloves, and said he flagged it to referee Herb Dean around four times during the fight without anything being done about it.

It is worth stating plainly what that is and is not. It is an accusation from the man who just lost a five-round decision, made in the minutes after the fight. No commission finding, no overturned result, no public review has followed it at the time of writing. Glove grabbing is a real and chronically under-policed problem in the sport, and it is also the most convenient thing in the world to remember after twenty-five hard minutes. Both of those can be true.

The rest of the card did not go the distance

Under the main event, the night was unusually violent. Reinier de Ridder stopped Roman Dolidze with strikes at 4:01 of the first round. Anthony Wint took out Terrance Chatman with an arm-triangle choke at 4:29 of the first. Vitor Petrino was the exception, shutting out Serghei Spivac 30-27 on all three cards in the co-main event.

Dricus Du Plessis, where are you? I want you. Let's go. No. 1 contender to fight for the belt.
— Gregory Rodrigues, in his post-fight interview in the cage

What UFC Sacramento changes at middleweight

Rodrigues asked for the former champion

With the microphone in his hand, Rodrigues did not ask for a title shot. He asked for a name. He wants Dricus Du Plessis, and he framed it as the fight that would settle who challenges next rather than as a demand for the belt itself.

It is a smarter call than it first looks. Sean Strickland holds the middleweight title and Khamzat Chimaev is the obvious next in line, so the queue in front of Rodrigues is already occupied by two men with a history against each other. Beating a former champion is the fastest way to walk to the front of it, and Rodrigues is now on a four-fight winning streak at 21-6, unbeaten since Jared Cannonier caught him in February 2025.

Hernandez pays for a second straight loss

For Anthony Hernandez the arithmetic is harsher. He is 15-4, and the eight-fight run that made him a contender has now been followed by two defeats: the February stoppage against Sean Strickland, and this. He turned 32 with a division ahead of him; he leaves Sacramento with a damaged leg and a lot less room.

The kinder reading is that he lost to a bad matchup on a night when his one weapon was answered twenty-five times out of twenty-eight, in front of his own crowd, and still took two judges to the final round. That is not the profile of a man who is finished. It is the profile of a man who needs a different kind of opponent.

Look the numbers up yourself

Takedown accuracy, takedown defence, knockdown counts and full records for Gregory Rodrigues, Anthony Hernandez and everyone else on the UFC Sacramento card are in the FightHub app, updated after every event. Open the two profiles side by side and you can see the whole main event in the grappling numbers before you read a word about it.