DWCS 89 results: Alex Apodaca sweeps Bella Mir in Las Vegas

Five fights, four finishes, and the only bout that reached the judges was the one with the famous surname on it. That is Dana White's Contender Series 89 in a sentence, and if you want the harsher version: the four undercard fights lasted 14 minutes and 22 seconds combined, which is less cage time than Bella Mir and Alex Apodaca spent going the distance above them.

I went 0 for 5 on this card. Not one pick. I will get to that.

The main event was the fight I had circled and it went the way the tape said it would rather than the way the marquee did. Apodaca, eight years older and coming off a fight only 32 days earlier, took all three rounds on all three cards. 29-28, 29-28, 29-28. Keith Peterson refereed. Mir never won a round.

That scoreline deserves a beat of attention, because a 30-27 sweep would have read as a mauling and this was not that. Three 29-28s means every judge found two rounds they could give Mir and gave them to Apodaca anyway, which is the profile of a fight decided on volume and position rather than damage. Apodaca has now won four straight and all four by unanimous decision: Karine Cristine in September 2025, Shanna Gomez in January, Devon McDonald in July, Mir on Tuesday. She is 4-1. She does one thing and she has done it in four consecutive fights against four different opponents, and on Tuesday she did it to an undefeated prospect on national television with a contract in the room.

Mir goes to 4-1. Her first four professional wins included three first-round submissions, and she carries a 4-0 professional submission grappling record next to them. None of that showed up. There is no shame in the loss and there is a real lesson in the shape of it: a grappler who cannot get the fight to the mat is a striker with a worse striking résumé, and 13 months between fights is a long time to sharpen the wrong tool.

On to the rest of it, in descending order of what it tells us.

Nick Galanti ended Carlos Petruzzella in 35 seconds. That is the fastest finish of the night and it is also the biggest scalp: Petruzzella walked in at 15-1, the most decorated record on the card by a distance, and walked out having been knocked out in the time it takes to read this paragraph. Galanti is 8-1 now, southpaw, out of CFFC, and he has won five in a row since his only professional loss, to Brandon Holmes in August 2024. I picked Petruzzella by decision on the strength of the sixteen fights. The sixteen fights were not the argument I thought they were.

Guilherme Uriel needed 50 seconds and a second invitation. Uriel lost on this show a year ago, TKO'd in round two by Josh Hokit on August 19, 2025. He came back 371 days later and submitted Mario Piazzon inside a minute. He is 8-2. I want to flag this one specifically because the Contender Series repeat appearance is a genuinely brutal ask: you are being re-evaluated by the same people, against a fresher opponent, with the tape of your failure already in the building. Uriel is the fourth-most interesting man on this card and the only one who has now beaten it.

Sean Clancy Jr. stopped Gary Balletto Jr. at 3:54 of round two and moved to 9-0 with nine finishes. Nine professional fights, nine finishes, no judge has ever seen him work. He is 23, from Scotland, and Cage Warriors developed him from a first-round TKO in April 2023 to this in three and a half years.

I took Balletto here, and I took him loudly. My case was that a 4-0-1 professional boxing record and three bare knuckle wins constitute a tested, transferable skill that an 8-0 prospect's record cannot answer. That case was not wrong in its logic; it was wrong in its subject. Balletto is 31 and falls to 11-4, and the thing worth saying about him is that three winning professional combat sports records is a career most fighters would take. He does not need the Contender Series to have been worth doing.

Ronald Humphrey submitted Alexis Miranda at 4:03 of round one to go 5-0, all five by finish. "The Career Ender" carries a 77-inch reach on a 70-inch frame at welterweight, which is a seven-inch ape index and the sort of physical outlier that regional opponents simply cannot prepare for. Miranda drops to 9-3. I picked Miranda on experience. Experience lost four times out of five on Tuesday.

Two notes on the night as a whole.

The first is about our own numbers, and I am including it because the alternative is quietly not mentioning it. Our model had the card at 3-2: it correctly read Clancy (it gave Balletto 36.0 percent, the biggest underdog line of the night, and Balletto lost), correctly read Uriel at 60.8 percent, correctly read Humphrey at 52.2 percent, and missed on Mir and Petruzzella. I overrode it three times. I was wrong all three times, plus twice more where I agreed with it. There is a version of this paragraph where I explain that away. This is not that version.

The second is about matchmaking. I wrote before the card that four of the five fights sat inside a band our model could barely separate, and that this was not one of those Contender Series shows where prospects get walked across a stage. That part held up. Four finishes out of five is not what a card of walkovers produces; it is what happens when you book competitive fights and let the better man be revealed in a hurry. Whoever built this card should keep the job.

Keith Peterson worked three of the five bouts and Gary Copeland the other two, and neither had a decision to make that anyone will still be arguing about on Friday. Given the week the sport has just had with scorecards, I will take it.

Ten people went to the Meta Apex on Tuesday to fight for the 51 percent of Contender Series alumni who never get a UFC fight. Five of them are on the right side of that number today. Nobody will tell them which five until Dana White says so on camera, which is its own commentary on how this show works.