UFC 313: Pereira vs. Ankalaev PPV Pay Per View 3/8/25

In Sin City on Saturday night, the Ultimate Fighting Championship is putting together another exciting pay-per-view, headlined by an intriguing title fight. The main event will see Alex “Poatan” Pereira defend his Light Heavyweight belt against Magomed Ankalaev. This will be the fourth title defense for Pereira since he won the vacant Light Heavyweight title at the expense of Jiri Prochazka at UFC 295 in November 2023. He has since beaten Prochazka again, Jamahal Hill and Khalil Rountree Jr. The former Middleweight champion is 12-2 with 10 knockouts.

Alex Pereira has done for UFC over the last few years. Seven PPV main events, seven championship title fights, seven knockout finishes, and six post-fight performance bonuses with a 9-1 record inside the Octagon. The timing could not have been better when you consider the promotion’s other top stars. Israel Adesanya is no longer champion (or even a contender), Jon Jones fights once per year (if we're lucky), and Conor McGregor hasn't competed since 2021. Pereira is an active, exciting champion who moves PPV units and that’s why Dana White and Co. were delaying this fight — and elevating mid-carders like Khalil Rountree Jr. to championship contender. This is prize fighting and “Poatan” is the “Golden Goose” so not surprisingly, UFC execs are “praying” Pereira defeats Magomed Ankalaev atop the UFC 313 fight card this weekend in “Sin City.” He probably won’t, and UFC knows it, but they can at least say they milked every last drop from the current champ. “Basically or theoretically, it’s a striker versus a grappler,” Pereira told reporters during the UFC 313 media day (watch it here). “So if I was a fan, I’d actually want to watch the fight. As a fighter, I want to fight the fight. He’s a complete fighter, not only a wrestler. He has skills everywhere. But I’m prepared, too. I’ve been training wrestling, grappling, since before I joined the UFC, since I first came to Connecticut to [train with] Glover Teixeira. I came there to be an MMA fighter and I’m ready for this.”

There’s not a lot I can tell you about Pereira that you don’t already know. He’s an elite kickboxer with devastating knockout power and ... not much else. In terms of offensive weapons, he reminds me a lot of Mariano Rivera. For those of you unfamiliar with baseball, Rivera was a relief pitcher who gunned down most of the league with essentially one pitch. Hitters knew it was coming and fanned anyway. Against Ankalaev, you can expect the usual bag of tricks from the champion and whether or not they work all depends on the challenger’s strategy. Pereira’s closest contest to date came in his split decision victory over Jan Blachowicz, a fight that saw the Pole take “Poatan” to the ground on three separate occasions. Blachowicz is a good wrestler but if we’re being honest, it’s no feather in your cap to ground the Brazilian. Even Adesanya was able to shoot and score against Pereira. Opposite a Dagestani brute like Ankalaev, it’s not a question of “if” Pereira will be taken down, it’s a question of how many times — and what the champ is able to do from the bottom. “We’ll come out there in the stand-up, and then we’ll see what happens,” Ankalaev told reporters during the UFC 313 media day (watch it here). “I don’t know how many rounds it will go, but from the very first round I will try to find a finish. You can say that maybe he’s the biggest star at this moment, but I think his time is maybe up at this point. I think the UFC is going to have new faces and new stars coming up.”

Ankalaev could flip the script and let his hands go; after all, he’s got double-digit knockouts across 19 victories. It just seems like an unnecessary risk and for all his prowess on the feet, Ankalaev went to the scorecards against the likes of Nikita Krylov, Volkan Oezdemir, and Thiago Santos, among others. They are not on the level of Pereira and trying to out-maneuver the champion for 25 minutes just sounds idiotic when he’s vulnerable to the ground game. If the only thing that matters is winning the title, then it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Ankalaev doesn’t mug-and-slug his way to victory. The champion is too tall and too lean to keep himself upright and I don’t have a ton of confidence in his ground game; which to date, has produced a total of zero wins by submission.