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.
