Examples of the Best Fighting the Best '01-'16

How so? Please explain your criterion for doing so.

 

One of the things I was thinking about when I posted this thread was that mma guys will always say that in the UFC the best always fight the best. But I don't think that the best fight the best any more frequently in mma than they do in boxing. If you take the best fighting the best to mean a top ten p4p type guy fighting another top ten p4p type guy, then that **** is like unicorns in either sport. We get about one a year, ten every decade in boxing. I sincerely doubt that you get even that many in mma.

So what does that even mean: the best fighting the best? Are we just talking about guys fighting their mandatories? Because that happens hundreds of times a year in boxing.

Or do we mean that two highly skilled opponents meet in the ring? The talent pool of boxing is almost eight times as big as the talent pool of mma, so on average our number 8 ranked contender is as good as their champions. You put two guys ranked in the top ten of their division against each other and that should be as an elite a fight as you'll find in the UFC. That happens frequently in boxing, on any given week you can find that.

If you look at the fifteen best fighters of this century in boxing vs the fifteen best from mma, the two sports are clearly not on the same level.

Boxing
1.Manny Pacquiao 2.Floyd Mayweather 3.Erik Morales 4.Marco Antonio Barrera 5.Juan Manuel Marquez 5.Joe Calzaghe 6.Bernard Hopkins 7.Nonito Donaire 8.Roman Gonzalez 9.Andre Ward 10.Sergio Martinez 11.Guillermo Rigondeaux 12.Sergey Kovalev 13.Gennady Golovkin 14.Saul Alvarez 15. Wladimir Klitschko

mma
1.Anderson Silva 2.George St Pierre 3.Jon Jones 4.Fedor Emelianenko 5.Chuck Lidell 6.BJ Penn 7.Jose Aldo 8.Randy Couture 9.Matt Hughes 10.Dan Henderson 11.Antonio Rodriguo Nogueira 12.Wanderlei Silva 13.Demetrius Johnson 14.Mauricio Rua 15.Vitor Belfort

Does anybody think that these are comparable level athletes? Does anybody think that Mayweather and Pacquiao aren't superior to Silva and St-Pierre? When you look at their CVs, the guys they fought in a career, is there any doubt that the boxers fought stiffer competition? Just look at who these guys have fought:

Manny Pacquiao- Mayweather, Marquez, Morales, Barrera, De La Hoya, Cotto, Bradley, Margarito, Mosley, Hatton, Ledwaba
Floyd Mayweather Jr.- Pacquiao, De La Hoya, Alvarez, Castillo, Corrales, Mosley, Cotto, Hernandez, Marquez
Erik Morales- Pacquiao, Barrera, Zaragoza, Ayala,
Marco Antonio Barrera- Pacquiao, Morales, Marquez, Hamed, Tapia, Ayala
Joe Calzaghe- Kessler, Bika, Hopkins, Jones
Juan Manuel Marquez- Pacquiao, Barrera, Mayweather, Bradley
Bernard Hopkins- Trinidad, De La Hoya, Joppy, Wright, Tarver, Pavlik, Jones, Pascal
Gonzalez- Viloria, Estrada, Sosa, Yaegashi
Donaire- Darchinyan, Rigondeaux, Narvaez, Marquez, Montiel, Arce, Nishioka, Walters
Ward- Froch, Kessler, Bika, Abraham
Sergio Martinez- Pavlik, Williams, Chavez Jr.
Rigondeaux- Donaire
Kovalev- Hopkins, Pascal
Golovkin- Lemieux, Murray
Alvarez- Mayweather, Mosley, Cotto, Lara, Khan, Trout
Klitschko- Povetkin, Byrd, Peter, Ibragimov, Thompson, Haye, Fury

Compared to our boxers, who the hell did the mma guys fight? I think that boxers clearly face the better competition.

 

Another thing that often comes up in these types of discussions is the belief that fighters used to fight the best more frequently and we are living in some kind of decadent age. Here's a list of who the champs at each weight fought in 1965 and in 2015, 50 years later. You be the judge whether things have gotten better or worse. I think you'll find that the level of competition is more or less the same.

1965
Heavyweight
Muhammad Ali vs Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson

2015
Heavyweight
Wladimir Klitschko vs Bryant Jennings and Tyson Fury

1965
Light Heavyweight
Jose Torres vs Willie Pastrano and Tom McNeeley

2015
Light Heavyweight
Sergei Kovalev vs Jean Pascal and Nadjib Mohammedi

1965
Middleweight
**** Tiger vs Juan Carlos Rivero and Rubin Carter and Joey Giardello

2015
Middleweight
Gennady Golovkin vs Martin Murray and Willie Monroe Jr. and David Lemieux

1965
Welterweight
Emile Griffith vs Manuel Gonzalez, Jose Stable, Eddie Pace, Don Fullmer, Gabe Terronez, Harry Scott, Manuel Gonzalez

2015
Welterweight
Floyd Mayweather vs Manny Pacquiao and Andre Berto

1965
Junior Welterweight
Carlos Hernandez vs Eddie Perkins and Mario Rossito and Percy Hales

2015
Junior Welterweight
Lucas Matthysse vs Ruslan Provodnikov and Viktor Postol

1965
Lightweight
Carlos Ortiz vs Ismael Laguna and Ismael Laguna

2015
Lightweight
Jorge Linares vs Kevin Mitchell and Ivan Cano

1965
Junior Lightweight
Flash Elorde vs Rene Barrientos and Teruo Kosaka and Frankie Narvaez and Kang-Il Suh

2015
Junior Lightweight
Takashi Uchiyama vs Jomthong Chuwatana and Oliver Flores

1965
Featherweight
Vicente Saldivar vs Raul Rojas and Howard Winstone

2015
Featherweight
Leo Santa Cruz vs Jesus Ruiz and Jose Cayetano and Abner Mares

1965
Bantamweight
Fighting Harada vs Dommy Froilan and Eder Jofre and Katsuo Saito and Alan Rudkin

2015
Bantamweight
Shinsuke Yamanaka vs Diego Ricardo Santillan and Anselmo Moreno

1965
Flyweight
Salvator Burruni vs Jo Horny, Pone Kingpetch, Francisco Berdonces, Demetrio Carbajal, Jerry Stokes, Michael Lamora, Horacio Accavallo, Katsuyoshi Takayama, Rocky Gatellari

2015
Flyweight
Roman Gonzalez vs Valentin Leon and Edgar Sosa and Brian Viloria