How George Staines wins at DWCS 94: output, takedowns, patience
How George Staines wins against Loai Abushaar at DWCS 94: the 10-0 lightweight's striking output, takedown game and the one number Abushaar can attack.
There is a version of the Contender Series headliner that everybody imagines: a knockout artist with a highlight reel, a walk-off, a contract handed over in the cage. George Staines is not that, and I think that is the most interesting thing about him going into Tuesday's main event against Loai Abushaar at DWCS 94.
The Hull lightweight is 10-0. Six of those ten wins went to the scorecards. He has three submissions and a single TKO. He is 26, he was 16-1 as an amateur, and our model gives him 85.7 percent to win on Tuesday, a stronger number than the sportsbook consensus of -351, which is about 78. So let's look at how a fighter who mostly wins on points becomes the surest pick on a card built to reward finishes.
The output gap
Start with the simplest numbers. In the fights we have tracked, Staines lands 5.07 significant strikes per minute and absorbs 1.34. That is a margin of nearly four strikes a minute in his favor, and across a fifteen-minute fight it adds up to a scorecard that isn't close.
This is the part the knockout-or-nothing reading of this show misses. Volume with defense is how you make three rounds feel one-sided without ever hurting anybody badly, and it is how Staines got through four OKTAGON decisions and two more in Cage Warriors without a loss. Nobody who lands five a minute and eats one and a third is in a close fight. They are in a long one.
What that output needs is range and time, and a Contender Series fight gives you fifteen minutes and a small cage. For a fighter whose game is accumulation, that is not a bad deal.
The takedowns
The second layer is the wrestling. Staines averages 3.02 takedowns per fifteen minutes in our tracking, at 52 percent accuracy. He does not shoot once to steal a round. He keeps going back to it, and it works about half the time.
This is where the three submissions come from. His second win in the OKTAGON Challenge qualifiers ended with a first-round rear-naked choke, and his most recent fight, against Conor McCarthy at Cage Warriors 207 in June, ended with a second-round submission. A fighter who wins the striking exchange and then keeps changing levels leaves an opponent with a bad choice every round: defend the shot and eat the volume, or deal with the volume and give up the back.
Against Abushaar the takedowns probably matter more than usual. The American is 6-foot-4, three inches taller than Staines, and a long lightweight usually wants the fight at the end of his reach. Taking him down is the most direct way to make that height irrelevant.
Where Abushaar has a way in
The number I would pick at is Staines' takedown defense: 56 percent in our tracking. It is the one soft figure in an otherwise tidy profile, and it means that just under half the attempts against him have landed. A fighter who is used to deciding where the fight happens can find it uncomfortable to be the one on his back.
Abushaar is 30, from MMA Lab, 7-1 as a pro and 5-2 as an amateur. I have to be honest about the limits here: we have no tracked rounds on him, so I cannot tell you his strike rate or how often he wrestles. What I can tell you is what his route looks like on paper. He has the frame to keep Staines on the end of a jab, and if he can make Staines work to get him down, he can turn a volume fight into a scramble fight. Scrambles are where records like 10-0 go to die.
That missing tracking is also part of why the model is so confident. It has ten wins of evidence on one side and a record on the other, and it prices what it can see.
What I expect
Staines has never needed the dramatic version of a win, and a dominant enough decision can still earn a contract on this show. My read is that he gets the takedowns early, makes Abushaar carry his own weight for three rounds and does just enough striking in between to leave the judges nothing to argue about.
If he wants the contract without leaving it to the promoter's mood, though, the submission is the bonus that settles it. He has three of them. Tuesday is a good night for a fourth.
Card, odds and live results are on the event page, and you can make your call at the pick'em.