UFC 310 Pantoja vs Asakura PPV Pay Per View 12/7/24

UFC Flyweight finishers Alexandre Pantoja vs. Kai Asakura will go to war TONIGHT (Sat., Dec. 7, 2024) at UFC 310 from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Anthony Smith was in Long Island when he got the news. Training with Ray Longo and his team last month, light heavyweight contender was looking to have fun by adding new wrinkles to his game, and the call came in that his longtime coach Scotty Morton had died suddenly after suffering a heart attack.  Pantoja vs Asakura “Him and I have trained every day or twice a day, damn near on average, six days a week since I was 17 years old,” said Smith of Morton, a renowned jiu-jitsu black belt and a fixture on the grappling and MMA scenes in Nebraska. “And he was my coach, but that was one of the smaller parts of what he was. That guy was my best friend. He was my mentor / older brother / father figure.” Smith caught the first flight he could back to Nebraska. And once home, he tore into training for his Saturday fight with Dominick Reyes with an added intensity. Not because it’s an important fight, but because it’s what Morton would have wanted. “He was the glue that held us all together,” said Smith. “And we just really leaned into training. Writing this series before each event gives me a chance to shout out fighters that are in the midst of a solid run of success or poised to embark on such a journey (in my opinion, of course), and being able to put a spotlight on them, even briefly, has brought me a tremendous amount of pride and enjoyment for the decade that I’ve been doing it.

Asakura is a wild card. He’s faced three truly excellent Flyweights in his career (Kape, Horiguchi, Ougikubo) and split bouts with all of them. That’s the nature of being an aggressive fighter with huge power — he tends to win or lose dramatically, and he doesn’t always have a consistent path to victory. Even so, I think the coin flip is weighted in his favor. Pantoja is a flawed fighter himself. His performance against Steve Erceg — less accomplished and less dangerous than Asakura — demonstrated some significant issues that could have easily cost him the belt. At 34 years of age, the Brazilian is entering his third championship fight in the last 12 months and has already fought 50 minutes in that span. That’s a lot of wear-and-tear on a fighter already deep into his career, and he’s going into the cage against an absolutely ferocious puncher. Unless Pantoja secures the early strangle — which is certainly possible, though Asakura has never been submitted — he’s going to end up fatigued in the cage with an opponent who can spark him.