If counting cruiserweight as heavyweight. who has better resume: Usyk or Holmes?

You can't be the top fighter and miss as many guys as both did. Fury post Wlad has only beaten Whyte and Wilder. If you only beat two top 10 guys over an 8 year period your claim to be the best becomes highly suspect.

Kabayel best Chisora way back in 2017 and Parkers career resurgence predates Usyk fighting Fury

It probably was a mistake legacy wise for Usyk to fight Fury and he would have been better off fighting Kabayel and Opetaia. Of course there is the possibility he loses which would harm his rating.

 

Fury hadn't beaten a ranked contender in years and had just been dropped by Ngannou. For any sane person this would raise obvious questions about the quality of the win. Wilder losing to Parker was also a bad look for Fury and Wallin losing decisively to Joshua

Kabayel has to be the favorite over Fury in 2024 and probably Dubois. Maybe some other guys as well.

 

This is just revisionist history to discredit Usyk. At the time everyone thought that Joshua and Fury were the two best heavyweights in the world when Usyk beat them especially since they were the dominant champs and Fury was undefeated. Both were also the favorite against Usyk and most of the people on fourms and social media thought Usyk was too small to beat them. Saying the lineal champs weren't actually the best fighters in the division is just nonsense. It also makes no sense for Usyk to fight non champs, your logic makes no sense at all.

 

How can you be a dominant champ and miss more than 90 percent of the division?

Joshua has lost to Dubois so it's reasonable to class Dubois as the better win

 

Maybe because you were the champ and beat the other top fighters like Joshua beat Parker who you thought was better and Fury beat Wilder who was the other top fighter so idk why suddenly you're assuming that because Parker and Kabayel are top fighters now they were the best fighters back then....... You have to look at things in context not afterwards

 

Joshua was overwhelmingly favored over Dubois as well. I think at some point we have to admit he wasn't as good as we thought.

If that's revisionist so be it but it seems like a more objective assessment

 

Or maybe he was good and just got worse after losing twice to Usyk. Loses take a lot out of a fighter

 

weren’t you the one proclaiming Joshua the best H2H heavy in history before his loss to Ruiz?

 

Admittedly he didn't tun out as good as I imagined back after he beat Kiltschko. But 9 wins in world title fights and a 2 time heavyweight champion is still a heck a career.

 

All his best wins were pre Ruiz. If he was damaged by a loss I'd say that was the one that did it not Usyk. He didn't appear to be declined vs Wallin or Ngannou relative to his post Ruiz pre Usyk fights

 

Remember Riddick Bowe?

 

He looked good in the second Ruiz and Pulev fights before Usyk and I think the second Usyk fight was a pretty good performance overall but afterwards he def didn't look the same in the Frankilin fight and its clear Wallin and Ngannou weren't the level of opponent to seriously challenge him

 

You are on a planet of your very own mate.

 

Tbh, saying Usyk barely beat Chisora shows you're not to take seriously on this topic.

Chisora being more conpetitive than most thought is not at all the same as "barely beat" of course.

And Joshua was definitely top 3 when Usyk beat him. If you want to do a "but he lost later" let's do the same to Holmes opp.

As for Dubois, I agree that he hadn't done much at that time, but let's apply the same to Weaver then.

Actually, applying these two principles to Holmess resume and it pretty much goes up in smoke.

 

I think you're right that Fury was one of the best fighters around at the time.

With that being said, I think I disagree with your more general point. IMO, when we are trying to figure out how good an opponent was, we should do it in retrospect. We often know more than the people at the time. We saw the fights, and know how they turned out. It artificially handicaps our analysis to try to pretend that we don't know what ended up happening.