2014 Fighter of the Year: Naoya "Monster" Inoue

Stumping for Naoya even though you gave Sergey your vote? :yep

Is that kinda like when the Democratic primaries are over and the losing nominee endorses the party's candidate to stand united against the GOP? (or vice-versa)

 

The 100 people that picked Crawford or Kovalev were, IMO, "just" wrong. Not off-the-wall crazy, just wrong (or, perhaps, sadly uninformed or under-appreciative of the lighter weights)

The 50 people who picked anyone except Inoue, Crawford or Kovalev - those are the real loonies. The poll is public. Make note of those names and remember this lunacy whenever they are discussing anything boxing related. :yep


Pacquiao is just flat out the wrong answer. He was at best #4 in 2014. (and realistically you could argue #6, behind Ruenroeng and Gonzalez)

Mayweather is just flat out the wrong answer. He beat one guy, twice, and it wasn't "the man in the division".

Gonzalez is just flat out the wrong answer. He would have been in the conversation with Crawford and Kovalev but ultimately when all is said and done in that race he would have been #3 or #4 depending on how you weigh in Ruenroeng's victory over Ioka.

Ruenroeng is just flat out the wrong answer. He isn't even in the conversation unless you include his controversial victory over Ioka, which, if you do, technically puts him up there...neck and neck with and maybe just ahead of Gonzalez, still not the #1. Take away the Ioka victory, and Ruenroeng is completely irrelevant.

 

I should have left off Pac and May and just had it be a five-man race.

Since we didn't go the "fill out all ten possible spots" route I see no reason to have padded it with a Saunders, Povetkin, Walters or Klitschko when none of them were any closer to having the same kind of year as Inoue (or even Crawford/Kovalev/Ruenroeng/Gonzalez behind him) than Pac or May were.

 

Yeah but p4p lists are subjective and really mean nothing.

 

Well, not all of them. Straw for instance, right now is utterly depleted with only two guys worth even speaking about (hopefully on their way to a definitive showdown pretty soon: http://www.boxingforum24.com/showthread.php?t=526825) but yeah, 112lbs is STACKED, as is 115lbs to a slightly lesser extent. Even light fly, while not as hot as the other two divisions in the fly range to which it's subordinate, has more than just a couple of world class names worth following.

 

All well and good. Pac beat the #3 in a division and then some guy who didn't even figure into the welterweight rankings because he wasn't a welterweight.

Inoue beat TWO #1's in TWO divisions.

It really isn't rocket surgery.

 

I think you could make a reasonable case for Maidana having been #3 h2h at welterweight himself when he began his Mayweather rivalry. He was coming off a 4-0 (3) run at the weight since linking up with Robert Garcia after his loss to Alexander. Three of those (JSK, Lopez, and Broner) were very good wins over top 15 welters.

He also didn't really look bad. Maidana did better than expected; there's a difference. By the end of the 1st encounter Mayweather had adjusted enough to win very clearly (only a few crackpots thought it was a controversial decision) and he won the rematch even wider against pretty much the exact same version of Maidana having figured him out and made the necessary adjustments.

He doesn't belong anywhere near Inoue/Crawford/Kovalev but neither does Pacquiao.

Including them on the poll was equally as much a mistake.