Jared Anderson vs Frank Sanchez - IBF Final Eliminator

Nice! Anderson isn't the talent he was hyped to be, but I really like his enthusiasm.

 

The sport needs to hang its head in shame if Usyk’s next opponent ends up being Anderson.

nothing against Anderson, but no.

 

+Hrgovic, Ajagba and Richard Torrez.

 

He'd have at least beaten a mediocre gatekeeper if he gets past Sanchez.

It's not a lot, but it's more than he's done now..

It's not nearly enough to be anything other than a bad joke as a mando, but we've seen it all before.

 

And when SO many fights don't get made, you have to start looking at the potential reasons why...

One is that Sanchez is some kind of murderer and they're all terrified of him - seems unlikely, given how little he's proved.

Another is that he's making demands that others won't agree to - given how unlikely the former is, this seems more likely to me.


Sanchez is nothing special at all, and shouldn't be in this position to begin with - the fact that a fight between him and Anderson is seen as competitive tells you that straight away because Anderson is nothing special either.

 

At least Anderson is fighting somebody,,,,

 

No.

The problem is a sanctioning body that won't simply rate the 10 best contenders in order and then get out of the way.

These sanctioning body folks want desperately to have some control over the sport. All that's required of them is to rate the 10 best contenders in order. NOTHING ELSE.

They don't need to create interim champs and hold one eliminator after the other. Just rank the 10 best contenders. That's your job. Do your job.

Chisora is an old man who just wants to win his 50th and final fight and move on. Itauma's team have a young fighter with a handful of fights, and they want to pick his opponents to give him the experience to succeed down the road. Dubois just got his head knocked in. Coming back from a KO is difficult.

They don't want to take orders from a sanctioning body that shouldn't be acting as a manager and a promoter and dictating fights to anyone.

THAT IS NOT THE RATING BODY'S ROLE. It is to rank the top contenders. To recognize who the best heavyweights are.

When they start saying you have to fight him, that's where they START SCREWING UP.

When fighters ignore them, then they have to strip a champ (often the best fighter in the whole division) and remove him from the ratings (so now the best fighter in the division isn't in their rankings). Then they order people to fight in eliminators. If they don't want to, they get bounced.

Eventually, your top 10 has no resemblance to who actually is the champion and who the 10 best contenders are.

And the orgs do that to themselves by DEMANDING fighters fight others and punishing them if they don't. ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS RATE FIGHTERS. That's it.

Boxers have always fought who they wanted on their own schedule.

It's not a league. It's a sport where every man is for himself. A bunch of dorks outside the ring trying to pretend they control that end up ruining whatever good they started out trying to do.

 

Fights don't get made because boxers don't want a random org taking control of their careers and telling them when and where and who to fight.

When was Muhammad Ali ever FORCED to fight a mandatory contender? EVER? In two reigns? When was Joe Louis ever forced to fight a mandatory contender? Ever?

The answer is never. They fought who they wanted on their own timeline. And they fought a lot. And they eventually got around to just about everyone.

Sanctioning orgs should just rate fighters accurately and move out of the way. They all start off saying they want to recognize the best and rate the REAL top fighters. Then they create a bunch of dumb rules, and the fighters don't follow them (because the org isn't their manager), and then the ratings turn into the same mess the last ratings' org turned into.

 

Don’t forget Richard Torrez, who was also ahead of Anderson in the rankings before and turned it down.

I don’t like Anderson being in a final eliminator, but blame those guys who rejected it.

 

Why does the IBF need a final eliminator?

Why can't the ratings body members just rank someone the #1 contender like ratings bodies have done since top 10s have existed?

Chisora was the #9 IBF contender when he beat the #12 IBF contender Wallin to become the #2 contender.

That made ZERO sense.

Now the IBF is taking their #3 guy and putting him against their #6 guy to make a #1 guy.

IT IS RIDICULOUS.

Rate the Top 10 contenders from 1 to 10. That's all we require of them. That's it.

Rank the 10 best contenders. Then step away. If that's too difficult of a job, find another line of work.

Usyk will fight the #1 guy next time around if you rate someone he finds compelling to fight.

Otherwise, don't worry. You'll still get your sanctiong fee for a Usyk defense regardless of who he fights.

Ranking bad fighters highly because they were the ONLY ONES willing to accept your dumb rules just makes it LESS LIKELY the champion will want to fight the crappy guy you end up rating #1, because everyone knows the person is undeserving.

Why do they make this so goddamn difficult?

They aren't making anything better. They are just screwing around.

 

If Usyk fought Anderson I'd pay just for the comedy value.

 

Completely agree - orgs should just rank fighters (properly) and get out of the way.

Only thing I would say, and it's not really disagreement as such, is that if the fighters were interested in jumping through the hoops for title shots then my point would obviously still apply - if anything, fighters choosing not to go with the fights the orgs wants to see tells us that either the orgs are trying to push nonsense fights, or that the fighter who's more keen to jump through the hoops isn't willing enough to make sure the other guy follows him.

Also, there's a disconnect at times because the fighters most willing to jump through hoops for rankings aren't usually the top guys at a given time - where the better and more proven fighters are more likely to have the orgs wanting them to fight (as it's a bigger cut for them)... That imbalance in willingness could easily create the illusion that genuinely lesser fighters are getting ducked by better ones who they have no business expecting to spend time on them.

I don't buy the concept of avoided boogeymen - especially little proven ones - there are almost always better explanations for what some think they're seeing.

 

I suspect the problem is...

If they did this, then all the orgs would look the same and then there's no reason for them to exist at all.

Which, of course, there isn't.

So they don't.


And what we get are nonsense lists and sometimes nonsense mandatories, nonsense interims and even nonsense champions.