Dana White’s Contender Series welcomes featherweight Angel Pacheco this week, as he takes on Danny Silva for a crack at the UFC.
Pacheco (7-1) is no stranger to UFC-level talent: he’s been training with the New England Cartel, staying with coach Tyson Chartier and working alongside Rob Font to prepare him for a fight with Song Yadong that eventually fell through.
Pacheco’s own career resumes this Tuesday after a year on the sidelines due to a knee injury.
“I didn’t think it was too bad at first. It would pop and stuff, and I just kind of trained through it,” Pacheco told Cageside Press in a recent exclusive interview. Since he could still run and do pretty much everything, the CFFC and LFA alum opted to forgo addressing the issue. There was just one problem.
“Just grappling was a tough ask I guess, in certain situations. I ended up sparring, doing mixed sparring, and somebody took my back, and I tried to escape— and it popped completely. After that, I could not walk even.”
That led Pacheco to pull out of a scheduled fight on the regional circuit last December. “If I can’t properly prepare, I won’t have the confidence to fight,” he added.
It all worked out in the end, as coach Chartier believed he could get Angel Pacheco on the Contender Series. “I was thinking about fighting early this year, maybe like February or March. Tyson had already told me, ‘I think I can get you on Contender.’ It’s pointless to take a short notice fight against good guys for CFFC or something like that, because locally, it was getting hard already to find fights for me. So it was going to be a little bit of a bigger stage like an LFA or a CFFC or CES, and it was kind of short-notice opportunities that I kept getting.”
Chartlier pointed out that they’d already waited that long — so they opted to hold out for the Contender Series. “I believe I can get you in,” Pacheco recalled Chartier saying, “and he got me in.”
Pacheco has also been training under Brock Larson at home in Minnesota. With two solid teams behind him, he’s now focused on Danny Silva.
“From what I’ve watched of him, he’s a very good fighter. He seems well-rounded. We have a similar style even, we we fight, we prefer to stand,” Pacheco said of his opponent. “He seems to me to be more of a counter-striker, but he’s aggressive, so he’ll stay in your face and force you to punch at him. He switch hits, he’s a good calf-kicker, he’s a good fighter. I like watching his fights. If I wasn’t watching him, I’d be like ‘yeah I like watching this guy fight’ sort of thing. And even after the fight. It is what it is, we’re just fighting for what we want.”
While he might enjoy watching Silva, Pacheco does see areas where he believes he has the edge.
“I think he’s a good fighter. I think stylistically though, I’m better than him on the feet. I think he has good things that he can do, but I just need to make sure to not let them do them.”
The UFC hopeful also believes he can put the pressure on an athlete he acknowledges is a pressure fighter himself.
“We both are pressure fighters, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him pushed back. Also, I don’t know if he’s ever been in any sort of adversity in a fight,” said Pacheco. “I truly believe I will put him through some adversity, and he’s going to have to dig deep and kind of figure it out on that stage. So we’ll see.”
Watch our full interview with DWCS featherweight Angel Pacheco above. Pacheco fights Danny Silva on Week 8 of the Contender Series, Season 7 on September 26, 2023.
