To hell with him IMO.
Don'Tale Mayes is one of my favorite "project fighters". He's not that good, though I felt like he was improving slightly over time compared to some of the other unranked Heavyweights and wanted to see where he would go. He took so much damage against Hamdy and all for nothing. I hope he at least is able to get back on track against Sakai.
I'm telling you Greco Roman wrestlers in MMA have been failing at a constant rate these past 5 or so years and we've had a bunch of elite ones enter MMA too. It's kind of a bummer, maybe the skillset just isn't very translatable.
I have a pet theory that it's an incredible base for MMA due its natural upright posture, the "grind", the clinch work, etc... but only in places like the United States or the former Soviet Republics where it's almost always accompanied by some other more well-rounded grappling base. For instance, in the U.S. it's more or less unheard of for any accomplished Greco guy to not have come up wrestling folkstyle through through high school, college, etc. Hell, many get started as early as elementary school these days. In Russia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, etc. there's a very high chance that any given Greco competitor will have grown up training/competing in some combination of Sambo, Judo, Pankration, and the like. And of course, in both regions it's inordinately common for wrestlers from one Olympic style to "cross over" and at least dabble in the other, so even a primary Greco guy won't be ignorant of freestyle. Doubly so in, say, Dagestan of course.
This is in stark contrast to many nations that don't have such strong overall wrestling/grappling traditions. They'll often treat freestyle & Greco as tangentially related albeit compartmentalized Olympic sporting disciplines for their athletes and that's it. A Greco guy from Morocco doesn't need to have any knowledge of how to execute or defend a blast double anymore than, say... a sprinter needs to master his ability to run a triathlon. This is is why, in my opinion, guys like Madsen, Hamdy, or even Hermansson, will always have a sharp ceiling on their trajectory unless they train their MMA wrestling like absolute mad lads the moment they make the transition in order to round out their skills, while guys like Jones, Couture, Evloev, Ankalaev, etc. have historically done pretty well.
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