Does anybody know how long the average champion holds a title? I am wondering both in terms of title fights and years. The records for each division mostly hover around twenty defenses or a little lower. Joe Louis was champ for twelve years, Bernard Hopkins was IBF champ for ten, but even the best champs only tend to reign for three or four years. I'm guessing that the average is something like a year and a half or two years and maybe two defenses. Twelve defenses is downright unusual. So what's the average? We've got like 60 major belts in the sport and I'm just wondering what the average turnover in a year is. How many new champs can we expect to see each year and at what point does a person's reign become statistically significant and an outlier? Usually, when a guy has six or seven title fights under his belt, I start to get the feeling that he's legit.
He's an obvious exception. But even with him, he's gotten farther than I thought he would. I did expect Stiverne to beat him in their first match and then I expected some random can to get lucky and spark him out which hasn't happened. He's not special, but I think it's fair to say that he's proven that he belongs in the top five right now. If I had to guess at this moment then I think he might be a Tommy Morrison, Gerry Cooney, Shannon Briggs level talent, which actually isn't terrible.
So many variables, like Wald dominated for a decade, would he have dominated with AJ & Fury around? I don't think so, he'd lose a few, so would Fury and AJ. HW division is also full of knock-out artists who can change a fight with 1 devastating blow, even from highly unfavoured guys like Mccall & Rahmen cutting LL's reign short at the top. There's also the jumping up divisions, like RG would probably stay undefeated if he never jumped up a weight division too high, same thing might happen with Crawford.
Okay, let's look at some examples from the heavyweight lineal title, going off of wikipedia's list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lineal_boxing_world_champions John L. Sullivan 7 years James J. Corbett 5 years Bob Fitzsimmons 2 years James Jeffries 6 years Marvin Hart 1 year Tommy Burns 2 years Jack Johnson 7 years Jess Willard 4 years Jack Dempsey 7 years Gene Tunney 2 years Max Schmeling 2 years Jack Sharkey 1 year Primo Carnera 1 year Max Baer 1 year James Braddock 2 years Joe Louis 12 years Ezzard Charles 2 years JJ Walcott 1 year Rocky Marciano 4 years Floyd Patterson 3 years Ingemar Johannsen 1 year Floyd Patterson 2 years Sonny Liston 2 years Muhammad Ali 6 years Joe Frazier 3 years George Foreman 1 year Muhammad Ali 4 years Leon Spinks less than a year Muhammad Ali 1 year Larry Holmes 5 years Michael Spinks 3 years Mike Tyson 2 years Buster Douglas less than a year Evander Holyfield 2 years Riddick Bowe 1 year Evander Holyfield 1 year Michael Moorer less than a year George Foreman 3 years Shannon Briggs 1 year Lennox Lewis 3 years Hasim Rahman less than a year Lennox Lewis 3 years Wladimir Klitschko 6 years Tyson Fury 1 year Okay, that's 44 acknowledged lineal reigns according to wikipedia spread out over 131 years minus the 5 year gap between Klitschko and Lewis. 126/44= 2.8 years per lineal reign @ heavyweight. Now, we break that up into categories. 4 less than a year, 11 one year, 10 two year, 6 three year, 3 four year, 2 five year, 3 six year, 3 seven year, and Joe Louis. More than half of the champions have 2 year reigns or less. 13 percent will last 3 years. 7 percent last 4 years. 4.5 percent can dominate for 5. 7 percent make it a sixth year. 7 percent hold onto the crown for 7 years. And only one champion has made it longer.
Okay, it took some time but I looked up how many defenses each of those fighters managed to put up. Fury 0 Klitschko 11 Lewis 2 Rahman 0 Lewis 6 Briggs 0 Foreman 3 Moorer 0 Holyfield 0 Bowe 2 Holyfield 3 Douglas 0 Tyson 2 Spinks 3 Holmes 12 Ali 0 Spinks 0 Ali 10 Foreman 2 Frazier 4 Ali 11 Liston 1 Patterson 2 Johansson 0 Patterson 4 Marciano 6 Walcott 1 Charles 4 Louis 26 Braddock 0 Baer 1 Carnera 2 Sharkey 0 Schmeling 1 Tunney 2 Dempsey 5 Willard 1 Johnson 8 Burns 13* At least half of these are questionable bouts against 0-1 or 1-5 opponents Hart 0 Jeffries 7 Fitzsimmons 0 Corbett 2 Sullivan 6* Half of these were stopped early by the cops. # of defenses 0)13, 1)5, 2)8, 3)3, 4)3, 5)1, 6)2, 7)1, 8)1, 9)0, 10)1, 11)2, 12)1, 13)1*, 26)1 Checking the data, it appears that more than half of the reigns lasted 2 or fewer defenses with 13 having no defenses. 30 percent of champions do not have any successful title defenses and lose it the first time out. 157 successful title defenses spread over 44 reigns should be an average of 3.5 defenses each reign.
Things have changed. Some fighters used to fight 8+ times a year back in the day. Does not happen at the top level nowadays. Fighters moved up divisions way less frequently. Nowadays, many and even most of the historically great fighters are making plans for the next stop the moment they arrive in a new one so years reigned and defenses made are much less. I remember was it at some point in 2010 or 2011 I believe there were only 4 lineal champions across the 17 divisions. Would be randomly nice to know. Would take quite a countless amount of hours to figure out, though.
