UFC 331 results: Joshua Van outpoints Pantoja over five rounds
UFC 331 results and analysis: Joshua Van beats Alexandre Pantoja on cards of 48-47, 49-46 and 50-45, and Iwo Baraniewski sees a third round for the first time.
That was a very good card that will be remembered for one round of judging and one kid who had never seen the third round of a fight.
Joshua Van beat Alexandre Pantoja over five rounds at UFC 331 in Los Angeles, and the three officials who watched the same twenty five minutes turned in 48-47, 49-46 and 50-45. That is a five point spread on a unanimous decision. Derek Cleary gave Pantoja rounds one and four. Sal D'Amato gave him round four. Ron McCarthy gave him nothing at all.
I am not calling McCarthy's card a robbery, because the man he scored against lost anyway, and a shutout on a fight three judges agreed on is not the crime the word is usually spent on. I am saying that a 50-45 and a 48-47 cannot both be a description of the same fight, and that we have now built a whole judges page out of exactly this kind of receipt because it keeps happening and nobody on the broadcast ever asks about it.
Van is 24. He took Fight of the Night and he took the five rounds. Everything else on the card was quicker.
Photo: Sexto Round / CC BY 3.0
On to the rest of it.
The kid who had never been past round one
Iwo Baraniewski lost a split decision to Alonzo Menifield, and the detail that matters is not the result. It is that the 27 year old from Poland had never been in a third round in his life.
Look at what he had done before Saturday. Contender Series 82, knockout at 21 seconds. UFC 323, TKO at 1:29. Against Austen Lane in March, TKO at 28 seconds. In June, when Billy Elekana fell out and Junior Tafa took the booking, TKO at 1:25. Four wins, four first rounds, three minutes and 43 seconds of total cage time. He had a professional record and almost no professional experience, which are different things.
Then Menifield, who is 38 and has been in the deep water for a decade, took him into it. All three judges scored round one to Baraniewski and round two to Menifield. Round three decided the fight: Chris Leben and Jovany Varela gave it to Menifield, McCarthy gave it to Baraniewski. Twenty eight seconds of prior third round experience against ten years of it, and it came down to that.
That is a loss I would not read as a ceiling. The knockouts were real and the gas tank question was always going to get asked eventually; better it gets asked at 27 against a veteran than at 31 in a main event. What he does in the next camp is the whole story.
The finishes
Arman Tsarukyan TKO'd Mauricio Ruffy at 4:56 of round one and took Performance of the Night. Four seconds from the horn. Jason Herzog waved it off, and nobody in the building thought it was early.
Photo: inFocus media / CC BY 3.0
Patricio Pitbull stopped Dooho Choi at 3:28 of the first. Pitbull is 39 and did not need the second round. Choi has now spent most of a decade being matched as the guy who either wins spectacularly or gets stopped, and the sample is getting long enough to stop calling it variance.
Sean Sharaf knocked out Gable Steveson in twelve seconds. Twelve. Steveson came in with an Olympic gold medal and a 1-1 professional record and left with a 1-2. I have no clever line about this. Frank Trigg got to it as fast as anyone could have.
Joanderson Brito TKO'd Giga Chikadze at 1:57 of round one on the early prelims, which is a brutal place for a former title challenger to be standing. Chikadze is 38.
Casey O'Neill submitted Eduarda Moura at 3:22 of the first and took the other Performance of the Night. Easily the best thing on the early card and nobody who buys the pay-per-view at main card time saw it live.
Marlon Vera stopped Charles Jourdain at 2:02 of round three. Vera getting a finish in the third is the version of that fight I would have picked, and I would still have been nervous about it the whole way.
The ones that went to the cards
Robelis Despaigne took a split decision off Tai Tuivasa, which is now the stretch of Tuivasa's career where every result is a referendum. Michael Aswell Jr. beat JooSang Yoo on another split. Edmen Shahbazyan took a unanimous nod over Brunno Ferreira, and Ryan Gandra needed 2:04 to finish Ozzy Diaz.
Three split decisions on one card, plus a unanimous with a five point spread inside it. Four of the thirteen scheduled bouts ended with judges disagreeing about what they had just watched. The rule here is not complicated: a fight that three trained officials score three different ways is a fight the scoring criteria failed to describe, and the fix is published criteria and open scoring, not another round of asking the public to trust the process.
The one that did not happen
Renato Moicano vs Brian Ortega came off the main card and never got rescheduled onto it. That is the fourth main card slot on a numbered pay-per-view, gone, and the card still delivered. Worth remembering the next time a card change gets treated as a disaster in the week before an event.
What I want next
Van has the flyweight division's attention and 24 years old is a long runway. Baraniewski needs one more fight at exactly this level, not a step up and not a step down. Steveson needs to decide what this is. And somebody needs to ask Ron McCarthy how a fight is 50-45 when the two men sitting next to him had it inside one round.
Full card, every result, every scorecard: UFC 331.