This post is wonderfully written and articulates my thoughts on H2H too, better than I could. It’s why I enjoy H2H as a thought exercise but for the life of me don’t understand why it’s taken even remotely seriously when rating fighters….at best it’s informed fiction.
Thanks Paul, you’ve written a fine post yourself. The funny thing, when it comes to some fighters, their calculated H2H successes imagined in the realms of fantasy see them “acquiring”’resumes far greater than they achieved in their actual careers. What the..?Lol. And it almost seems as if those same pundits who afford them those successes actually view their H2H calculations as representing a legitimate component of said fighters’ actual careers. Lol. A more recent example of this type of applied thinking might be Tyson Fury, not even retired, instead a still “active” fighter. Some have Fury beating every man and his dog from all boxing history - without Fury having even beaten every man and his dog available to him in the here and now. We could also point to fights that made no mean contribution to the perception of a fighters greatness or quality (or even possibly detracted from same) - fights that defied popular, pre fight, H2H opinions. Say, Ali v Liston 1, Norton v Ali 1, Foreman v Frazier 1, Ali v Foreman and Douglas v Tyson to name just a few. If they weren’t real fights but only matches left for the pundits to calculate the outcomes on paper….well, we’d have imagined “careers” very different to the ones that actually went down in the real world.