Colby Covington vs Dillon Danis Booked as High-Stakes Match for RAF07 in Tampa
Real American Freestyle has added a marquee co-main event to RAF07, confirming a cruiserweight showdown between Colby Covington and Dillon Danis for March 28 at the Yuengling Center in Tampa, Florida. The event is the promotion’s seventh flagship card and will stream live on Fox Nation, continuing RAF’s push to position freestyle wrestling on a major broadcast platform.
Colby Covington vs Dillon Danis in RAF Announced
RAF07 is already scheduled for March 28 at 8 p.m. local time at the Yuengling Center on the University of South Florida campus, with tickets currently on sale to the public. Real American Freestyle is billed as an unscripted professional freestyle wrestling league that brings elite wrestlers and crossover names from MMA onto a single mat-based stage, with RAF07 following recent shows in South Florida and building on the brand’s growing calendar of events.
Covington heads into Tampa off a dominant debut for the league at RAF05, where he headlined “Covington vs. Rockhold” in Sunrise, Florida, on January 10, 2026. The former UFC interim welterweight champion used steady pressure, control ties and chain wrestling to overwhelm Luke Rockhold, securing a 12–0 technical fall in the second round of their cruiserweight bout and immediately establishing himself as one of RAF’s most effective crossover athletes. That result moved him to 1–0 in RAF competition and set the stage for a callout-driven storyline that now carries into RAF07.
Danis arrives as one of combat sports’ most polarizing names and brings a decorated grappling background to the league’s cruiserweight ranks. The New York native built his reputation in elite no-gi jiu-jitsu competition before turning to MMA, where he competed for Bellator in the welterweight division and posted two first-round submission wins in 2018 and 2019.
More recently, he shifted into the Misfits MMA scene, where he captured the Misfits MMA light heavyweight (175 lbs) title with a 15-second submission of Warren Spencer under modified MMA rules and remains listed as the division’s current champion heading into late 2025.
Stylistically, the matchup is a clean wrestler-versus-jiu-jitsu clash tailored for a freestyle wrestling format. Covington’s engine, mat control and top pressure that proved decisive against Rockhold will now be tested against Danis’s preference for scrambles, upper-body ties and transitions that create exposure-type positions familiar to grapplers crossing into wrestling.
On a card that already features established freestyle names and championship bouts at other weights, RAF is clearly betting that this co-main event will draw both wrestling fans and MMA viewers to Fox Nation for a rare meeting between two high-profile figures from different corners of the sport.
