Juliana Franqueira is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner with the rank of purple belt. She has trained with some of the top names in MMA and has fought professionally with names such as Sarah Kaufman, Jessica Aguilar, Cris Cyborg, Megumi Fuji, Gina Corrander, Yves Martel and Rashad Evans. She is currently signed to the Elite XC roster to defend light heavyweight champion and former WWE star wrestlers Lesnar and Triple H. Prior to signing with the UFC, she had fought for the World Heavyweight title twice. Since joining the roster, she has fought against female opponents who are around the same size as she is, however, these fights have been very competitive affairs with her winning each encounter by submission.
Being a Jiu Jitsu purple belt, Franqueira should have good height advantage over most opponents but this does not seem to be the case. The only fight where she has stood up and fought her opponent was against Rene Dupree who is a very tall southpaw. In the match, it was apparent that Franqueira had an advantage on Dupree due to her height, however, when the fight was over, it was unclear as to whether or not she would need surgery to correct the height difference between the two. It could also be said that she simply tried too much with her height advantage and spent too much time being flashy and being a spectacle on her fights. There were times though where she would utilize her shorter tools effectively such as kicks and punches but at other times, she would just let her arms do the work.
There are a lot of things that make a trainer successful and one of them is being able to assess their students ability based on how they present themselves in the gym. You can spot most trainers with big egos who think that bigger is better when it comes to fighting and submitting their opponents. However, this is not always the case as many people get big because they are beautiful or rich but are unable to translate this into the octagon. It will be interesting to see where Juliana Franqueira goes from here because she has definitely built a name for herself as one of the top female MMA fighters today.