Cincinnati Cobra is one of my favourite fighters. He is certainly underrated and would have been a completely different beast to anything Usyk ever faced, but the converse would also be true. Ar hie Moore is another dangerous fighter at that weight, even Marciano who fought below 200 pounds.
Usyk has achieved everything vaguely possible for his career. It is not objective to think a GOAT cannot come after the year 2000.
The goat can’t have that few fights. Just can’t. People like Ali and Louis fought more ranked men then they even have fights. How could they be goated over them?
It depends on your criteria. If depth of win resume is key amongst your criteria, it becomes tough for modern fighters because not only do they not fight anything like as often as fighters of distant eras, neither do the best opponents they beat. As a consequence both their quality and quantity of wins over other "great" fighters is limited. From a cross era, H2H perspective, sure, agreed.
Floyd's padded resume, which includes Connor McGregor, has questionable decisions, catchweights, and avoidance of all stylistic risk, whilst being the heavily supported A-side from fighting ODLH onwards. He doesn't make top 20 IMHO. Tainted Boxing Exploiter. Fighting as frequently as Harry Greb is a thing of the past, but that means a boxer like Usyk, who has achieved something I doubted was possible, can never be GOAT, which then by definition, makes the term GOAT, contradictory. Should be GBY2K. Boxing will almost certainly never revisit its heyday and I can accept that the talent pool was much bigger back then, and therefore the champions were better.
In that sense I think it becomes impossible for them to compete for that title. Although many don’t want to hear it I think Floyd Mayweather has the best case of anyone in the last 30 years. Just for his record and punch stats being as incredible as they are. But Mayweather lacks the resume that say Charles or Greb or SRR has
Yeah, I have Maske #2 behind Ottke myself. Damiani #3, Aaron Davis gets the fourth spot, and Donnie Lalonde rounds out the top 5.
I don't think Usyk needs to fight anywhere near as frequently as Greb to be in the GOAT conversation. However, he has only has 22 fights. Not enough for GOAT even though at least half of those have come against top notch oppoisition. IMO anyone in that conversation needs to have a minimum of 35-40 fights. Usyk is great though. Amazing. Top 30 all time easily. He has more quality wins in a short career than a lot of fighters do in a long career.
Never really saw it with Pep. Sure, he was very consistent, and he was very good for a very long time, but I just think he lacks enough standout wins and I question how great the FW division he ruled over was. I am open to being persuaded on the greatness of the Will of the Wisp though.
Well then, I guess there's no better time for me to brag about this write up https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/a-deeper-dive-on-willie-peps-greatness.710523/
