How our forum compares eras

Let's try this experiment:

1) Nominate a way to tell how strong an era is.

2) Only ONE nomination per post. Explain it in as much detail as possible in that post.

3) If you want to nominate multiple ways of evaluating era strength, do it in multiple posts.

4) Everyone who agrees with the method in a post, "like" the post.

5) Everyone who disagrees, reply to the post with "disagree", and state your reasons.

6) No arguing with the "disagree" posts.

Hopefully this will produce some idea of where the agreements and fault lines are between our forumites.

 

I'll begin.

Frequent, documented fight fixing at the highest levels are one sign of a weak era.

When we compare eras, we're mostly talking about contenders and champions. If we can't tell how many of an elite fighter's matches were legitimate, there's no way to know how good (or bad) they were.

A lot of fixed fights may mean that the contenders (or champ) didn't deserve a high ranking at all. Maybe the best guy in the division is rated as #7. Maybe half the top 10 belong closer to the top 50. Fight fixing may have a domino effect, since historical ratings often depend on only a few fights between guys we assume are good.

For example -- add a few fixed fights, and suddenly that champ with three title defenses is a guy who one fixed title match, and two legitimate victories over fighters who owe THEIR rankings to fixed fights. It snowballs in ways that makes bad matchmaking (i.e., contenders all ducking each other) look benign by comparison.

 

EDIT: Misread post. Never mind.

 

Could you elaborate on step 2? What standards are you using to evaluate the talent?

 

Ahhh. Drat. I misread your initial post to mean exactly the opposite of what you were saying.

I need some sleep.

 

Sign of a weak era #3 (4? 5?) -- Contenders look clueless on film, based upon universally accepted standards of boxing.

This one's pretty self explanatory. I'll just add one nuance: by universally accepted, I mean accepted by coaches now AND in the 1950s or so. If fighters look bad according to both standards, they're probably doing something wrong.

 

Signs of a weak thread starter: Threadstarter's posts make no sense, and actively confuse their victims despite the latter's best efforts to understand them.