Alexandre Pantoja is not booking anything soon. His coach at American Top Team, Marcos “Parrumpa” da Matta, says Pantoja needs mental rest after his loss to Joshua Van at UFC 331, and that there is currently no timetable for his return to competition. Sherdog first reported da Matta’s comments, and Boxing News followed with the same message from Pantoja’s camp: the head comes first, the next fight comes later.
That is an unusual thing to hear from a fight team in public. Most camps answer a loss by naming a target or floating a date. Da Matta went the other way and left the calendar blank.
The fight itself explains some of the weight. Van defended his flyweight title against Pantoja at UFC 331 in September, and by most accounts Pantoja did the thing people expected him to do. Yahoo Sports’ weekly power rankings credited him with five takedowns, the route a lot of observers had picked as his best shot at the belt. It didn’t hold. As the rounds went on, Van took over the striking exchanges, and the judges gave him the decision. Yahoo moved Van up to No. 9 in its rankings off the result.
There is a specific kind of sting in a loss like that. You prepare for months around a plan, you execute it often enough to land five takedowns on the champion, and the scorecards still go the other way because he outworked you on the feet late. That’s harder to shrug off than getting caught with one clean shot, and it makes sense that a coach who has watched that from the corner would want his fighter away from fight talk for a while.
Van, meanwhile, is already moving on. He headlines UFC 336 on January 30 at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto against Manel Kape, the former RIZIN bantamweight champion, in what’s billed as his second title defense. The co-main event is an interim welterweight title fight between Carlos Prates and Michael Morales, the winner of which is expected to face Islam Makhachev. Those two bouts are the only ones confirmed for the card so far, according to Bloody Elbow.
So the flyweight division keeps turning without Pantoja in the picture, at least through the end of January. Whoever leaves Toronto with the belt will be the champion Pantoja eventually has to think about, whenever he’s ready to think about it again.
My take: da Matta is right, and saying it out loud was the braver choice. A coach’s job is usually framed around the work he does in camp, the drilling and the game planning, but some of the most important calls happen afterward, when the easy move is to throw a fighter straight back into another cut and another camp to chase the feeling away. Pantoja did his job against Van in the way everyone predicted he’d have to, and it still wasn’t enough. Let him sit with that somewhere other than a gym for a bit. Van and Kape fight on January 30, and that result will tell Pantoja’s team more about the road back than any timeline they could invent this week.
