Jessica Andrade Shows She's Uniquely Dangerous in Stunning KO vs. Rose Namajunas

Let me tell you about Jessica Andrade, who is is 5'2" and 115 pounds, which makes her a little under half my size.

Let me tell you another thing about Jessica Andrade: She is utterly terrifying.

What makes Andrade so scary is, well, everything.

She's a strawweight, which is a division that has quite a bit of violence, but it's usually the long, drawn-out kind of violence. It looks bad, but nobody gets hurt. Andrade hurts people, usually with punches. Or just one punch. She's the only person in the division who can end a fight with one punch.

The scariest thing about Andrade, though, is when she uses her brute strength to lift you off your feet, picks you up over her head and then spikes your head into the ground.

That's what she did to defending champion Rose Namajunas on Saturday night in UFC 237's main event to capture the strawweight title despite losing the first round handily.

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A year ago, Namajunas sat in a Denver cafe and told me she didn't like fighting all that much and could walk away at any second. And then she had a traumatic year, ultimately becoming a recluse and rarely leaving the house. This led to much speculation about her mental state and whether it would affect her fighting.

It did not.

She was even better than she was a year ago. What people don't understand is that fighting itself affects her mental state. She does not enjoy the sport and wants to do other things with her life. And it seems that moment has arrived.

"Going in, I thought this might be the last time I ever do this," Namajunas said at the post-fight press conference. "We'll see. It's a lot. I had a great time, so we'll see. I dunno. ... It's easy to dwell on the negative, but you also have to not give yourself grey hairs, either."

I have a soft spot in my heart for Namajunas and Barry, and in the seconds after Andrade slammed her on her head, my heart raced. It looked bad. Like, the kind of bad that can damage a sport forever. The replays, of which there were many, made it look far worse. I breathed a sigh of relief when Rose sat up. She was OK.

If she walks away from the UFC right now, she does so as the best fighter in her division. She was technical and fluid and intelligent in this fight.

But she got spiked on her head, and that overrules all the stuff about fundamentally sound fighting. It's hard to think of a single strawweight or maybe even flyweight or bantamweight fighter who would have been conscious after that. I would have certainly died. This was a violence that few in the UFC are capable of delivering to others, and it's because few have the strength Andrade possesses. 

She has used that raw power many times before, both in striking and in a vice-like submission game. Ask Jessica Penne or Joanne Calderwood or Karolina Kowalkiewicz about Andrade's power. They will tell you. It's different. It's the kind of power that can overcome technical, precise, structured martial arts. It's the kind of power you can't really game-plan for.

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While Andrade wasn't convincing as the best strawweight in action on Saturday, she did look like something Namajunas will never be: The kind of fighter you do everything possible to avoid because you're scared she might hurt you like you've never been hurt before. The kind of person who takes a little pleasure in hurting you and in the violence and the competition and the thrill of it all.

Namajunas never cared about any of that and never cared about the glory or the championships. She won't be demanding an immediate rematch. It's far more likely she will vanish from the public eye and go off to try to accomplish her true life's goal, which is, as she said on the Joe Rogan Experience to "change the world" (h/t Sam Woolfe of Red Planet).

Andrade? She's going to keep putting the fear of God into people. She's going to keep hurting people, and if she does it long enough, maybe we will start talking about her in the same breath as Amanda Nunes as not just a pound-for-pound great but one of the scariest women on the planet.