RAF 11 preview: Ben Askren’s return anchors a card built around his impossible year

Ben Askren was not supposed to be able to walk to a wrestling mat this year. Saturday, at UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena, he steps onto one anyway.

Real American Freestyle’s RAF 11 goes Saturday, July 18, 2026 from Milwaukee, streaming live on FOX Nation starting at 8 p.m. ET. The main event is the promotion’s biggest booking to date, a catchweight bout between Arman Tsarukyan and Colby Covington for the inaugural RAF Crossover Championship. The co-main event is Askren against former UFC welterweight champion Belal Muhammad, on Askren’s 42nd birthday, in his home state, in his first competitive wrestling match in seven years. Frankie Edgar meets Clay Guida on the main card. The rest of the lineup blends elite freestyle wrestlers with MMA names in a format the promotion has spent 18 months refining across ten previous cards.

The Askren match is why most of the ticket sales moved and the road to it is the story worth telling.

Askren was hospitalised in late May 2025 with what began as a staph infection and turned, in a matter of days, into severe pneumonia. His wife Amy documented the sequence on Facebook in real time. By early June, Askren was on a ventilator. By June 24, he was on the double lung transplant list. Days after that, a donor became available. On June 26, he underwent the transplant. He would remain in hospital until July 22, a total of 59 days.

He does not remember most of it. Askren later told BBC Sport, ESPN, and Uncrowned that he has no recollection of the period between May 28 and July 2. His account of what happened during that stretch came from reading his wife’s journal. In his own words, from an Instagram video posted from his hospital bed:

“I actually just read through my wife’s journal because I don’t remember anything from May 28th to July 2nd. No recollection. No idea what happened. I just read through the journal and it’s like a movie. So, I only died four times. The ticker stopped for about 20 seconds.”

He weighed 147 pounds when he woke up. He had lost roughly 50 pounds, more than 22 kilograms, during the 45-day stretch of illness. He said he had not been 147 pounds since he was 15 years old. He also, he said later, turned to Christianity during the experience.

“There was multiple times where they thought I was dead,” Askren told Fox News. “Like I was dead, that’s the other side. I woke up and I just decided I was a Christian.”

The comeback timeline runs from July 22, 2025, when he was released from hospital, to July 18, 2026, when he walks to the mat in Milwaukee. Twelve months. In an interview with Uncrowned in June of this year, Askren told Ariel Helwani he had only recently begun training regularly. “I’ve been back coaching for three months now, on a regular basis,” he said. “Only five or six months ago, I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without getting winded and struggling. My physical capacity pretty much went to zero.”

He picked the opponent himself. He has been unusually clear that this is a one-time booking, not the start of a comeback.

Askren asked for a serious opponent because he considers his wrestling knowledge to be intact even if his physical capacity is not. Muhammad, 37, is a former UFC welterweight champion who lost the belt to Jack Della Maddalena in 2025 and has been rebuilding his position in the promotion’s welterweight picture through 2026. Askren and Muhammad have a training history together, which Askren referenced in the Uncrowned interview.

“Muhammad and I trained together for a little bit,” Askren said. “You know, it was interesting on which opponent I should pick, because when I signed with RAF, I was competing at a pretty high level. At the gym that I’m coaching at, we have quite a few guys who have won titles, so I got to wrestle them on a really regular basis. So, I was like: ‘Hey, I wanna wrestle someone really good, because I’m competing at a very high level still.'”

The past tense of the plan is doing work in that sentence. Askren originally signed with RAF in May 2025, before he got sick. The idea then was that he would compete at the level he had built to. What he is bringing to the mat Saturday is a version of himself he has spent the last year rebuilding, on the schedule his lungs would allow.

Muhammad, for his part, has said he understands the emotional weight of the match. His UFC schedule has continued in parallel. He fought Gabriel Bonfim at UFC Vegas 118 in June and has been active through the rebuild cycle since losing his belt.

Colby Covington, speaking about Askren ahead of the card, expressed public concern for his health. Per MMA Mania, Covington used the word “scared” and joked that Askren “died five times,” a slight embellishment of the actual four. It is the kind of framing that used to land in the Covington register as a jab. In this case it plays as something closer to genuine.

The wrestling ledger Askren brings to the mat Saturday is one of the more distinguished in American amateur history. He was a two-time NCAA Division I champion at Missouri, competing at 174 pounds, and a two-time national runner-up. He wrestled for the United States at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and made the quarterfinal round at 74 kilograms. He has coached full-time at his own academy in Wisconsin since retiring from MMA in 2019, following a loss to Demian Maia at UFC Fight Night in Singapore. His MMA record was 19-2 with one no contest, spanning championships in Bellator and ONE Championship. His only professional boxing appearance was the 2021 TKO loss to Jake Paul.

None of that is the reason people are tuning in Saturday. But the coaching hand, the freestyle technique, and the seven-year absence from competition are all part of what the match will look like.

The main event: Tsarukyan vs. Covington

The RAF Crossover Championship debuts Saturday with the inaugural title fight between Arman Tsarukyan and Colby Covington at catchweight. The bout has been building for nearly a year. Tsarukyan, the No. 1 lightweight contender in the UFC before Justin Gaethje’s undisputed title win last month, has become one of RAF’s most active MMA-side signings. He beat Urijah Faber at RAF 08 in April in a lopsided decision, then called Covington out from the mat afterward. Covington accepted, and the match was booked. Both fighters have credible wrestling backgrounds. Tsarukyan is a decorated Armenian freestyle competitor. Covington was an NCAA Division I All-American at Oregon State. The bad blood is real, publicly documented across podcast appearances and social media exchanges over the last two months. Whether the mat can contain it is a real question. RAF Georgia, staged in Tbilisi one week ago, produced a post-match brawl between Merab Dvalishvili and Henry Cejudo that has already been the subject of “who threw the first punch” video reviews. Milwaukee is one week later.

Frankie Edgar meets Clay Guida in a catchweight bout. Both are former UFC lightweights, both are decorated wrestlers, and both have transitioned into the RAF format since it launched. It is the kind of nostalgic booking that plays especially well for viewers who followed the UFC through the 2010s. Edgar’s second RAF outing, after a debut earlier this year, is a natural rebuild card.

Aeoden Sinclair takes on Magomed Ramazanov at 190 pounds. Michael Caliendo faces Mirzo Khayitov at 165. Trent Hidlay meets Magomedkhan Magomedov at 215. Skylar Grote squares off with Adeline Gray in a women’s 190-pound bout. Patrick Downey vs. Zac Braunagel, Anthony Cassioppi vs. Mostafa Elders, and Keegan O’Toole vs. Christopher Minto round out the wrestling-heavy portion of the card. Two title matches sit alongside them: Lucia Yepez vs. Felicity Taylor at 120 pounds, and Ben Davino vs. Arsen Harutyunyan at 135. Both are RAF championship bouts.

Broadcast

RAF 11 streams exclusively on FOX Nation. Coverage begins at 8 p.m. ET. There is no pay-per-view window and no cable broadcast. The event runs approximately three hours. Askren’s co-main event is scheduled to walk out around 10 p.m. ET, with the Tsarukyan-Covington main event following. RAF’s YouTube channel, which streamed portions of RAF Georgia and RAF 10 earlier this year, is likely to carry post-event highlights and interviews.

The Read

Saturday night is not a wrestling card in the traditional sense. It is a promotional event that has been building its identity across nearly a year of monthly programming, and it has arrived at a moment when three of its biggest storylines converge on a single evening: an inaugural title fight, a genuine grudge match, and a former Olympian returning to the mat after a medical event most people do not survive.

Askren has said the match is one-time. Muhammad has said he understands the assignment. Covington has said he is scared. Tsarukyan has said he wants the belt. RAF, by every indication, has said it is ready for the biggest audience it has drawn.

The main event will decide who wears the promotion’s first crossover championship belt. The co-main will decide something else. Whether Askren can still wrestle at a competitive level twelve months after nearly dying is the sport question. Whether the story of the year in combat sports can end with a birthday match in Milwaukee is the human one.