Despite taking place on a Thursday night, Shakur Stevenson-Edwin De Los Santos was a hotly anticipated fight, as America prepared to crown its latest pound-for-pound superstar.
However, although he won the belt and became a three-division world champion, most viewers were left unimpressed by the performance of Stevenson.
Stevenson won the fight by unanimous decision (116-112 x2, 115-113), in what proved to be an extremely uneventful contest, where fans in attendance booed the fighters who both seemed reluctant to engage throughout the twelve rounds.
Subsequently, plenty of Stevenson’s rivals have jumped on the bandwagon the criticise the dull match-up, with George Kambosos Jr in particular pretending to be asleep and Rolando Romero joking that Stevenson has ‘invented the cure for insomnia’.
The emphasis to engage was more-so on Edwin De Los Santos, who entered the fight as the perceived power-puncher. Yet, although the Dominican Republican has scored fourteen of his sixteen wins by knockout, he was unable to pin the American down and hit him with anything of note.
As a result, CompuBox revealed that De Los Santos landed the fewest number of punchers of any fighter in a twelve-round fight since the start of the data collecction in 1985, thirty-eight years ago – breaking Joseph Agbeko’s unwanted record of forty-eight punches against Guillermo Rigondeaux in 2013.
They combined to land 33 power punches. DeLosSantos 40 landed punches are the fewest landed in a 12-round fight in CompuBox's 38 yr. history. #StevensonDeLosSantos pic.twitter.com/NRcnpETBFm
— CompuBox (@CompuBox) November 17, 2023
The hard-hitting southpaw scored with just forty punches out of the three-hundred-and-sixteen that he threw, landing at a rate of just 12.7%. Meanwhile, Stevenson’s statistics don’t make for much better reading, finding success with only sixty-five punches in the thirty-six minute fight.
By comparison, William Zepeda, a fellow lightweight rival, landed 398 punches in his clash with JoJo Diaz last year, landing more punches in each of rounds three (45), four (44) and eight (44) than De Los Santos in his entire fight against Stevenson.
