Cain is at least somewhat overrated

Everyone talks about him like he's the GOAT H2H and just had injuries interrupt his career. But that's really not fair.

A. He gets a ton of credit despite a really **** poor resume. The best guy he ever beat was Dos Santos, and he lost once against him. How can we say how great he is H2H when he just hasn't been tested against nearly as wide an array of HW's as, say, Miocic?

B. There are always excuses with Cain, in all three of his losses, but those excuses just don't look like they hold water to me. A. Both he and Dos Santos were injured in their first fight. Neither injury really appeared to have a meaningful impact on the course of the fight. He just got caught against a great puncher. B. "Sea level" Cain. This is the excuse that bothers me the most. He mainly seemed to have a lot of problems with the Troll's dimensions and his jui jitsu. The gassing was probably more related to those problems than to the sea level. C. The leg injury. He was clearly outmatched and caught hard very early. It reminds me of the Solis-Vitali fight and a number of others. The punch didn't look like much, but replay clearly shows the damage done to the orientation of the victim before the injury or the stoppage. Most of Ngannou's punches don't really look like much, but they clearly have a fight ending impact. The injury was secondary to the punch that probably would have ended it one way or another.

C. Changing game. Cain looked tiny against Ngannou. He was at a huge size disadvantage. And really, how many high level HW's did Cain really beat who were remotely that much larger than him? No one, really. He was usually bigger or about the same size against the better fighters he faced. The two best ones he faced that he had a meaningful height disadvantage to he lost. The only "top" one he beat who had a meaningful weight advantage was Brock, who I just have problems taking too seriously. The talent pool is starting to get better in the HW division, now that the sport is a bit older and more penetrating now, and I think any version of Cain would have big problems running through it the way he did when he came up.

It's interesting, Vitali Klitschko is probably my favorite modern era boxer, but tbf a lot of my problems with Cain can probably be applied to him. I think there are very logical distinctions in Vitali's favor in any such comparison, but I can definitely see how polarizing it is to put someone who has never been nearly as tested as others on such a high pedestal.

I think Cain is ONE of the greatest HW's of all time, both in legacy and especially in H2H. But unlike conventional wisdom, and certainly unlike all the stuff UFC was pumping out last night, he is definitely not the GOAT in the former and very probably not the GOAT in the latter. And he achieved it in a very small historical timeframe with a very small talent pool that is only now starting to get larger. I think the Ngannou fight doesn't show that Cain is washed up as much as it shows that Cain wouldn't be such a beast in a deeper era.