UFC 331 results: Joshua Van outlasts Pantoja, and three splits

That was a good card with a bad taste at the end of it, and both halves came from the same place: the judges had more work to do at UFC 331 than anyone wanted them to have.

Joshua Van kept the flyweight title by unanimous decision over Alexandre Pantoja in a fight that earned both men a $100,000 Fight of the Night award and settled a rematch the first meeting never really did. Five rounds, 181 significant strikes for the champion against 147, one knockdown, and 9:11 of control time going the other way. Cleary had it 48-47, D'Amato 49-46, McCarthy 50-45. Three judges, three different fights.

Everything under it was either over in a round or went to the cards, and three of the five decisions were splits.

On to the rest of it.

Joshua Van is not the accident people wanted him to be

Pantoja came in with the grappling plan everybody predicted and he ran it: 18 takedown attempts, five completed, more than nine minutes of control. He still lost four rounds on two of the three cards, because Van got up, and because in the time Pantoja was not holding him Van hit him 181 times.

Van is 8-0 since his only UFC loss, 11-1 overall in the promotion, and this was his fourth post-fight check in twelve appearances. He is 24 years old. The first Pantoja fight lasted 26 seconds and the whole sport got to call it a fluke for nine months. This one lasted 25 minutes and nobody gets to call it anything.

Pantoja at 36 has now lost two in a row for the first time in his career, and the second of them was competitive enough that there is no reason to retire him. There is also no obvious fight left for him at the top of the division that he has not already had.

Arman Tsarukyan spent 296 seconds waiting

The co-main was a study in patience: Tsarukyan threw 19 significant strikes all night, landed eight, and one of them ended it at 4:56 of the first round. He also attempted ten takedowns and landed one, which tells you what Maurício Ruffy was doing with the other nine.

That is Tsarukyan's fifth Performance of the Night, his sixth post-fight award in thirteen UFC fights, and his sixth straight win going back to the Gamrot loss in 2022. He is the number two lightweight, he has been the number two lightweight for what feels like an administrative eternity, and the division has now run out of ways to keep him there without giving him the title shot.

Gable Steveson lasted twelve seconds

Photo: Gustavo Trujillo / CC BY 3.0

Sean Sharaf came in 1-2 in the UFC, having been knocked out in each of his last two fights, as roughly a 9-to-1 underdog, and knocked Gable Steveson out in twelve seconds. Steveson landed one strike. It is the shortest main-card fight of the year and the second UFC fight of an Olympic gold medalist's career.

I wrote a piece on Wednesday about how strange that betting line was. It was not strange enough.

The three splits

Alonzo Menifield def. Iwo Baraniewski, 29-28, 29-28, 28-29. Baraniewski landed more significant strikes (67 to 62) and controlled 4:19 to Menifield's 2:54, and lost. Chris Leben and Jovany Varela gave Menifield the last two rounds, Ron McCarthy gave him only the second. Fans scoring the fight on mmadecisions had it 101-71 for Baraniewski; the 13 media scorecards we have were 13-0 for Menifield. When the press and the public disagree that violently about the same three rounds, the rounds were the problem.

Robelis Despaigne def. Tai Tuivasa, 29-28, 28-29, 28-29. Despaigne got his first win since March 2024. Tuivasa has now lost eight in a row, and he lost this one having out-controlled his opponent by nearly two minutes.

Michael Aswell Jr. def. JooSang Yoo, 29-28, 29-28, 28-29. Aswell out-landed Yoo 70 to 46 and the split still happened, which at least is a split you can explain.

The rest, in descending order of consequence

• Marlon Vera stopped Charles Jourdain in the third, with three knockdowns, and ended a four-fight losing run in the process. Jourdain out-landed him 83 to 72 and was still on the floor three times. Vera at 33 is not getting back to a title shot, but he is the kind of fighter a division needs: everyone below the top five has to go through him, and now they have to do it knowing he can still put people down.
• Patricio Pitbull knocked out Dooho Choi at 3:28 of the first. He is 2-2 in the UFC at 39, which reads worse than it is: both losses were decisions to elite featherweights and both wins have been one-sided. A Bellator champion arriving late and finishing people is the best version of that story anyone could have asked for.
• Casey O'Neill submitted Eduarda Moura at 3:22 of the first after spending most of the round underneath her. Moura had 3:12 of control. O'Neill landed one significant strike all night and took $100,000 home for it, her third Performance of the Night.
• Joanderson Brito knocked out Giga Chikadze in 117 seconds. Chikadze has lost four straight and has not won since August 2023. He is 38. Brito has won three in a row and all three have been finishes or shutouts.
• Edmen Shahbazyan beat Brunno Ferreira 29-28, 29-28, 30-27, with a knockdown and 61 significant strikes. Quiet win, third in his last four.
• Ryan Gandra stopped Ozzy Diaz at 2:04 of the first to go 4-0. He was paid $14,000 to show, the smallest winner's purse on the card, and the $25,000 finish incentive nearly doubled his night.

Photo: UFS stuff / CC BY-SA 4.0

What I got wrong

Our model picked a side in all twelve bouts and got seven right, which is a shrug of a night undone by the one pick it was most certain about: Gable Steveson at 83.8 percent, twelve seconds, gone. It also had Chikadze as the underdog at 27.3 percent and was right, had Tai Tuivasa at 53.4 percent and was wrong by one judge, and had Patricio Pitbull at 36.6 percent against a man he knocked out in a round.

The full card, every scorecard and the disclosed purses are on the event page and in our payout table. The bit that will still be annoying next week is Menifield and Baraniewski, and the reason it will still be annoying is that nobody involved did anything wrong except the people who had to pick.