Broner vs Santiago results and highlights: Adrien Broner underwhelms but wins, Robert Easter Jr and Otto Wallin victorious

Adrien Broner is officially back in the win column despite quite the underwhelming performance in Showtime’s main event. Broner came into this fight taking on an unheralded opponent in Jovanie Santiago, but was back to his old ways of hardly throwing punches and letting his opponent dictate the pace for large portions of the fight.

Santiago got off to a pretty good start, consistently working the body once he started really throwing a couple of rounds into the fight. As the fight wore on it became clear that this was a real fight for Broner who had difficulty landing as clean as he’d like, even with his pot shotting tactics. The officiating in this bout was also highly questionable and likely will be discussed in the aftermath of the fight, with Santiago largely prevented from fighting on the inside and then there was a odd moment at the end of the fourth round when both fighters traded shots after the bell.

The referee would give both fighters stern warnings about keeping things clean, but then when the fifth round started the referee immediately called a timeout to take a point away from Santiago — one of the latest calls you’ll ever see. Santiago didn’t seem to be completely discouraged but did fall through a lull down the stretch before unloading in the 12th, a round which he seemed to clearly win. Unfortunately that wouldn’t be enough though, as the judges turned in seemingly wide scorecards for Broner, 115-112, 116-111, and a ridiculous 117-110. BLH scored the fight 114-113 for Broner with the dubious point deduction, but it should be noted that Showtime’s commentary crew and their Twitter poll all seemed to believe that Santiago earned the win here.

Broner would of course take exception to those opinion, saying ‘fuck Steve Farhood’ for scoring the fight against him, but the stats don’t make that a ridiculous claim at all — Broner barely threw over 300 punches for the entire fight. In fact, official CompuBox stats has Broner throwing only 338 punches, of which he landed only 98 (29%), while Santiago landed 207 of 697 (29.7%). Be that as it may, Santiago was rather gracious in defeat, not complaining and simply saying he believes it was a close fight that could’ve gone either way.

Otto Wallin UD-12 Dominic Breazeale

During Showtime’s heavyweight feature, Otto Wallin (22-1, 14 KOs) scored a solid win by thoroughly boxing circles around a lumbering Dominic Breazeale (20-3, 18 KOs). From the get-go it was pretty clear that Wallin has the hand and foot speed advantage and used that to repeatedly paste Breazeale with left hand after left hand. The only problem was that while Wallin started closing Breazeale’s right eye, he could never really hurt Breazeale, thus having an increasingly hard time keeping Breazeale off of him as the fight wore on.

It should be said that Breazeale looked pretty awful in this outing, with his defense only consisting of being a big man that can absorb some shots while hoping to land a homerun punch of his own. But by the later rounds Wallin was starting to fade from just trying to keep the bigger Breazeale off of him, although he was largely able to avoid any significant danger before the final bell rang. When it was all said and done, all three official judges turned in scores in favor of Wallin, 116-112, 117-111, and 118-110. BLH also cored the fight for Wallin 118-110.

Final CompuBox stats had Wallin landing 232 of 659 total punches (35.2%) while Breazeale landed a dismal 91 of 556 total punches (16.4%).

Robert Easter Jr UD-12 Ryan Martin

In the opener, Robert Easter Jr. (23-1-1, 14 KOs) had a good showing in a fairly dominant performance over Ryan Martin (24-2, 14 KOs) in a junior welterweight bout. Easter, unlike in past fights, actually fought using his length and established his preferred range early, scoring and outboxing Martin all over the ring. Easter did have a couple lapses in concentration though, where he inexplicably decided to stand int he pocket and trade with Martin for stretches of time, and when he did that Martin was able to score pretty effectively.

But once Easter realized that probably wasn’t the best idea he went back to using his jab and footwork to completely neutralize Martin’s offense. And in the end all three judges agreed that Easter won the fight, turning in one scorecard of 117-111 and two scores of 118-110. I also scored the fight 118-110 in favor Easter for BLH, only giving Martin two rounds where Easter fell out of his game plan.

Final CompuBox stats had Easter landing 161 of 539 total punches (29.9%) with Martin landing 118 of 629 (18.8%).