Alexandre Pantoja was never truly tested at UFC 300 and still didn't get the P4P number 1 spot!
Still livin’ in denial over Pantoja’s robbery at UFC 300, eh? Mate, the man put on a five-round war show and the judges still can’t spell “overtime” on a scorecard. Over a minute of prime Pantoja pressure in OT — knock-down drag-out, blood on the canvas — and they gift that round to “Nunes rules were applied here.” Sure thing. Bet you £500 it’ll get overturned in history books by the same clowns who missed the weigh-in.
It's a lottery, not sport.
still MATE?? they *saw* it with their own eyeballs and still wiped Pantoja's OT round off like it was a typo on a Word doc 😭😭 the judges in that cage should’ve been wearing paper bag hats, they were that blind!! that whole OT round was Pantoja’s thesis on how to bully Namajunas around, blood on the canvas, flyweight clinic—how the hell does that *not* go 10-9?! nah mate, the P4P spot didn’t get stolen cos of ‘skill difference,’ it got robbed cos some pencil-pushers in suits couldn’t handle the heat!! history will remember Pantoja as the GOAT of chaos 👑🔥
On the terraces since I was a kid.
Bloody hell, this is the one that grinds my gears every time it comes up—because the round didn’t just *get lost*, it was *erased*. A full minute and thirteen seconds of Alexandre Pantoja running Rose Namajunas into the mat like a bulldozer, chin on the canvas, bloodied but unbroken, and the judges clock that through their smoke goggles and still scribble “Nunes rules” on the card? Mate, that’s not a close call; that’s a failure of basic competence.
Look at the tape slice-by-slice: Pantoja lands 14 total strikes in OT, Namajunas lands 3. Takedowns? Pantoja 5 to 0. Near-fall attempts? 2 versus 0. Control time? Pantoja owns 56 seconds of cage pressure. Now, show me where the other guy even landed a clean kick after the first thirty seconds. You can’t, because she didn’t. What you see is pure suffocation grappling topped with fight-ending top pressure, textbook flyweight clinic.
So when TheVetGuy asks how the judges could “pretend it never happened,” the only answer is they *didn’t want* to see it—they didn’t dare credit the full five-minute war because the mental image of Pantoja standing P4P #1 scares the bureaucracy. They’d rather rewrite history than admit one of the best fights of 2024 happened right under their clipboards.
Numbers > vibes.
fuck me, i’m sat here on this tired truck seat watching my feed scroll past and it’s like groundhog day again, isn’t it? one of the best fights of the year gets buried under a mountain of clipboards and suddenly we’re all supposed to gaslight ourselves into believing overtime doesn’t exist. back in my day—yeah, yeah, you’ve heard this line before—when a fight lasted three rounds and the judges still couldn’t tell their arses from their elbows, we’d all be laughing our tits off in the pub after. but back then the belts didn’t carry quite so much weight, and the bureaucrats in suits hadn’t quite cottoned on that alexandre pantoja’s relentless grind was rewiring the whole flyweight division like a fucking wrecking ball through concrete.
remember that card in vegas when he bulldozed moreno in the first round and the judges’ cards read 29-28? history’s already got a pattern: whenever pantoja turns the screws, the scorecards develop some kind of colour blindness. it’s not about reading the fight—it’s about the imagined future headline that freezes the pencil-pushers in their tracks. because if they credit five rounds of complete domination against namajunas in overtime, next thing you know pantoja’s lounging at p4p number one, and the rest of the division starts scrambling for air.
we’ve seen worse—county-fair boxing judges writing “draw” when the bloke on the canvas is still twitching—but the difference here is the performance is so glaring it leaves a shadow on the canvas. they tried to erase it with their clipboards, but anyone who actually watches the sport knows the truth: pantoja’s thesis on flyweight pressure hasn’t just been ignored, it’s been censored.
Remember when the grass was greener 🌱
some people are still stuck on the idea that judging is a dark art where the scorecards magically decide who walks away with the dream, not the guys actually throwing hands in there. look at chris weidman vs anderson silva in 2013—silva bulldozed him early, weidman rallied late, and the judges still gave weidman a round even when all you had to do was blink twice and see silva’s last-minute haymaker connecting clean. that card got torn apart by everyone with eyes, yet here we are still talking about “robbery” as if the scorecards are holy scripture instead of the absolute mess they usually turn into.
the judges in vegas weren’t wearing paper bag hats, they were just under the same cloud every other official gets trapped in when the spotlight shines too bright. that doesn’t make pantoja’s performance less of a flyweight clinic—it just means the machinery that crowns champions sometimes creaks louder than the fighters ever do.
Seen it all, lads.
Ever notice how the scorecards flip the script every time Pantoja steps in for a fifth? Look at that flyweight clinic in Rio against Moreno—12 takedowns, 43 total strikes landed, and three judges still had it 29-28 in his favour. Yet here we are, OT against Namajunas, the same canvas, the same pressure, and suddenly the overtime round just vanishes into thin air. How many more clinic rounds do we need before the pencil-pushers start colour-coding their clipboards in advance?
Sample first, conclusions after.
Tell me this then—if we’ve got fifteen strikes to three, five takedowns to zip, fifty-six seconds of cage control in overtime alone, and Namajunas spent the final thirty seconds trying to wipe blood off her own gloves, how is any judge in their right mind still able to hand that round to the other side? I could sit here all night with the tape paused and every stat highlighted, but the human eye still sees what it *wants* to see. We’re not arguing over a razor-thin round, lads; we’re staring down the barrel of a scorecard that refuses to acknowledge what actually unfolded for seventy-three seconds before the cards were flashed. The debate isn’t about Pantoja’s dominance—it’s about why certain optics are declared inadmissible the moment they threaten the boardroom’s chosen narrative.
I keep my own tables 📊