Sean Strickland | Back In The Saddle

“It’s good — we have a really good group of people there that push me,” he mentioned, which quantities to a rave evaluate from the Californian. “It’s nice.”

With issues on the prime finish of the middleweight division at present in a holding sample as everybody awaits the primary title protection from champion Khamzat Chimaev, the chance to share the Octagon with a like-minded particular person like Hernandez is exactly what Strickland hoped for heading into 2026.

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“I wanted ‘Fluffy,’ I asked for it, and he wanted it,” started Strickland, who makes his seventh foremost occasion look in his final eight fights on Saturday. “Stylistically, I’ve never done much grappling, especially later in my career. It’s a test that I wanted and the guy’s on a six- or eight-fight winning streak, so what better name is there that you could beat?”

The matchup with Hernandez is as juicy a pairing as you are going to discover within the division in the intervening time: a conflict between two cardio monsters that not often take a backward step and genuinely love being deep within the muck contained in the Octagon. Where Strickland has ceaselessly drowned his opponents with excessive quantity placing, Hernandez is extra of a suffocate-you-with-relentless-grappling kind, setting the stage for a novel conflict of types between two males who thrive on controlling the tempo.