UFC 331: Van Defends the Belt He Took From Pantoja in 26 Seconds

On September 20, at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, Joshua Van makes the second defense of the UFC flyweight title he has held for a little over nine months. The man across the cage is Alexandre Pantoja, and I want to be precise about who is who here, because the marketing will blur it: Pantoja is not a hungry contender getting his first crack at gold. He is the former champion, the man Van dethroned, and this is a rematch, not a coronation waiting to happen for someone new.

That matters for how you should read everything that follows. Pantoja held this title for 29 months and defended it four times before Van ended the run in 26 seconds at UFC 323 this past December. Nine and a half months later, he gets the trilogy nobody actually had to wait for a trilogy on, because the first fight only happened once. This is the immediate rematch, and the numbers our database has tracked since that night in Las Vegas tell a more complicated story than "the kid solved the veteran."

Twenty-six seconds, and the tape doesn't agree with the highlight reel

Photo: Sexto Round / CC BY 3.0

Here's what actually happened at T-Mobile Arena on December 6, 2025. Alexandre Pantoja and Joshua Van fought for the flyweight title as the co-feature under Merab Dvalishvili's rematch with Petr Yan, not even the top of the marquee for the night that made a new 125-pound champion. Referee Herb Dean waved it off at 0:26 of round one. KO/TKO. Clean, fast, the kind of finish that gets clipped and replayed for years.

What the clip doesn't show is the split-second accounting of who was actually winning when it ended. Our fight-stats data has Pantoja landing 6 of 11 significant strikes to Van's 2 of 4, including a 4-of-8 edge on head strikes, in the 26 seconds the fight lasted. Pantoja was not getting outclassed. He was throwing and connecting at a healthy clip against the new champion when one punch changed the outcome of a 29-month title reign. That is not a knock on Van's finish, it's a real accounting of how thin the margin was.

What a five-defense reign actually looked like

Before Van, Pantoja's flyweight title run was one of the more genuinely dominant stretches the division has had. He took the belt from Brandon Moreno by split decision at UFC 290 in July 2023, then defended it four straight times: a unanimous decision over Brandon Royval that December, a unanimous decision over Steve Erceg the following May, a second-round submission of Kai Asakura in December 2024, and a third-round submission of Kai Kara-France at UFC 317 in June 2025. Two finishes, two decisions, zero losses, across 29 months as champion. He turned 35 during that stretch and never looked like a fighter running out of road.

He turns 36 in April and will be 36 years and five months old on September 20. Van turns 25 on October 10, three weeks after this fight, and will make the walk at 24. That age gap, 11-plus years, is real and it is the kind of gap that eventually catches up with championship-level fighters in a division where speed decides fights in under a minute. But "eventually" isn't "already," and a division that watched Pantoja submit two men inside three rounds in his last two defenses before the Van fight isn't a division where the former champion looked finished. He looked like a champion who got caught once.

The nine months since, and the one defense that filled them

Photo: Sexto Round / CC BY 3.0

Here is the part of the story that gets lost when a rematch gets billed as a coin flip between two guys standing still. Since losing to Van, Pantoja has not fought. Nine and a half months between UFC 323 and UFC 331, and there is nothing in our fight data to fill that gap. He goes into the biggest fight of the back half of his career off the longest layoff of his championship run.

Van, in the meantime, made his first defense. At UFC 328 in May, he beat Tatsuro Taira by TKO at 1:32 of round five, in a fight that earned Fight of the Night, not Knockout of the Night. That distinction matters. The fight that won Van the belt lasted 26 seconds. The fight that proved he could keep it went the better part of five full rounds against a durable, live opponent before the finish arrived. A champion who only knows how to end fights in half a minute is a specific kind of vulnerable; a champion who has now shown he can also grind for 25 minutes and still find the finish is a different proposition, and it's the one Pantoja has to prepare for.

Our rankings history backs up how fast the swing was. Van sat at No. 15 in the media flyweight rankings as recently as December 2024. He climbed to No. 1 contender by July 2025 off the Royval win, then jumped straight to champion after beating Pantoja, entering the men's pound-for-pound top 15 at No. 11 that same month. He's been ranked No. 10 pound-for-pound as of the most recent snapshot, September 8. Pantoja, who held the No. 1 pound-for-pound flyweight-division rank continuously through 2025 and sat inside the P4P top five for most of that year, dropped to the flyweight division's No. 1 contender spot immediately after the loss and has since slid to No. 13 pound-for-pound, not from anything that happened in a cage, but from nine months of other ranked fighters staying active while he didn't.

Our own Power Index, an internal rating and not a betting line, tells a version of the same story in a handful of numbers worth citing once: it had Pantoja a 55.6 percent favorite walking into the first fight (1,872 to Van's 1,833), so even our model didn't see the 26-second ending coming from the other guy. Since then, Van's rating has climbed from 1,833 to 1,881 after beating Pantoja to 1,903 after beating Taira, a new career high set in his most recent outing. Pantoja's has sat frozen at 1,850 since the night he lost the belt, unmoved because there has been nothing to move it, and still short of the 1,872 peak he set beating Kara-France. A rating can't fall or rise on a fighter who hasn't stepped in the cage. It just waits.

The symmetry nobody's selling you

I'll say the quiet part: it is very easy to write this as a young finisher solving an aging legend, and the highlight reel wants you to write it that way. But Van isn't some chin-of-granite prospect who's never been hurt. In July 2024, Charles Johnson knocked him out in 0:20 of the third round, a finish almost as fast as the one Van later landed on Pantoja. The champion defending on September 20 has been on the wrong end of a sub-30-second knockout in this exact same division, against a fighter with a fraction of Pantoja's résumé.

That is the actual story of flyweight in 2026, not a torch-passing morality tale. Two fighters who have each been finished in under half a minute, standing across from each other again, with a 29-month title reign and a Fight of the Night five-round war between them since the first fight decided nothing about who wins a rematch. Pantoja's résumé says he was the best 125-pounder alive for the better part of three years and lost one specific way, once. Van's résumé now says he can win that way and also win the long way, which is exactly the kind of range a former champion training a full training camp for revenge has to plan for and can't fully simulate.

Nine months is a long time to think about 26 seconds. Whether it was long enough is the only question this fight actually answers.