12 Divisions can save Boxing...

As a believer in changing the weight limits you moved them too much. They should be moving 5-10 pounds. Adjusting for inflation. LHWs the only one that should be moving 10 pounds because it needs to absorb the smaller CWs. You're almost name swapping divisions.

Superheavyweight can't work because there is no reason for superheavyweights to forgo competing in HW unless they stink. This division was piloted twice. Three times if you count MMA. It has never stuck.

Agree with making 12 weight classes though. I'd get rid of CW, 168 and the tweeners below Superfeatherweight. That gets us to 12.

 

Let me ask you people something. Would you watch football if it were broken up into different weight classes? Would you bother keeping up with all of them? Baseball? Basketball with weight categories and/or height? Football (the other one, the dumb one), or hockey or anything else? What would the strongman competition be with weight classes? Why are they even accepted in boxing to begin with? Stop the insanity!

 

Good because I was really worried you were talking about Football (the other other one, the smart one)

 

The problem with this is with the title system a one weight class sport would see most fighters rendered irelevant. Thats how boxing started. It changed for a reason.

In football you've got the whole team playing and being relevant together in boxing its 1 guy fighting another guy. One top 10, one top 100 for a whole world. One division means theres so many less successful fighters. While a few MWs would be able to succeed in a one division world most great fighters would not even be boxers.

Basketball does have height based positions. Its not formal but the C, PF, SF, SG and PG on a given team usually are sortable by height.

 

You really never know who will reply in good faith. That's something that I learned a long time ago.
...No weight classes and gender divisions in sport. Let everyone sort it out the way it's supposed to be. Stop making concessions for littler, weaker people. It's the only way we can evolve into warrior once again. The only way to do that is to stop babying everyone who isn't big and giving out participation awards.

 

Okay. Heres my favorite model. Goes 40/20/10/5/6/6/6/6/6/6.

Heavyweight
Bridgerweight 225
Lightheavyweight 185
Middleweight 165
Light Middleweight 155
Welterweight 150
Light Welterweight 144
Lightweight 138
Super Featherweight 132
Featherweight 126
Batamweight 120
Flyweight 114

 

The inconvenient truth is that nothing can save boxing … at least short of medical advances that remove brain damage from the equation.

There will always be combat sports but they also will always be savage and archaic. But they will become more and more niche as they will have a decreasing place in society. We’ve seen too much. We know too much.

Participation is the lifeblood of any sport and boxing has long, long been on the decline. Medical evidence of the effects of concussions isn’t going away. Heck, football (the tackle kind) is probably entering the end game but doesn’t quite acknowledge it yet … but fewer and fewer kids are taking it up. Same with boxing. (Soccer, which has concussive consequences from bouncing that ball of their heads, is a bit further down the road, but its day will come too.)

Why? Because parents love their children. It’s basically as simple as that. They want their kids to see the benefit of fitness and sport but not at the risk of brain damage or having their teeth knocked out.

In the old days, the father might take his kid to the gym to toughen him up. Today’s kids are too soft to toughen up. Go into a boxing gym (or an MMA gym or any of the sort) and you will see adults — much less younger ones — spending a third of their workout time staring at their phones. Boxing is too tough. It’s too demanding. And the risks and consequences too high.

MMA passed boxing because it kind of threw out rules and appeals to that savage place in our animal brains because there are fewer rules. But it’s a very small pool of participants. Boxing is its slightly more civil cousin.

Beyond that, if we want to ‘save’ what’s left of boxing, weight divisions aren’t the problem. You can have eight divisions or 12 or 17 … and people will accept that if there’s one actual champion per division. Instead there are four — and that doesn’t count the more spurious ones that get passed off as world title like circus conmen coming to town and saying the strongman in their tent is actually the strongest man in the world, lol. Start with eliminating the alphabets and let the best fight the best to decide who is the one true middleweight champ rather than the one of the many.

But even beyond that, the talent pool isn’t deep enough. I see someone with like 15 or 20 fights being proclaimed as the GOAT in their division when they have basically no real experience, never been tested (not enough contenders around to develop the ones who could truly test them).

Boxing is passé in America. The influx of Eastern Europeans added an influx of some talent at the time fewer fighters were being developed in the ‘first world.’ But that, too, will dry up.

Enjoy it while you can, but boxing is what would be called a post-mature industry. The growth period is over. Fewer than 5% of the fighters make more than 95% of the money. That’s not sustainable. The economics are such with insurance and medical requirements that you basically cannot put on a club show anymore, so there’s no grassroots growth, no guys working their ways up through the ranks. It’s just Olympic-level amateur talents and opponents who are there to collect a few paydays before cashing out. Nothing in between.

Sad state of affairs.

 

Nah.

 

But I agree with your thread, I should've said, as a good start.