Is peer evaluation important/relevant to ranking older fighters?

The Dempsey-Foster thread got me thinking, how important is peer evaluation to the ranking of fighters? Dempsey in particular is a great example, getting high(GOAT) marks from his peers whom he fought and those who observed his bouts. How much water do these comments hold. And how should they be used, if at all, in H2H and pound for pound ranking?

 

Not as important as competition fought, fight footage and fight record.

Ray Leonard's comments on Joe Calzaghe are a fine example of how comparatively useless an opinion is to footage and record.

 

Theres a lot of peers, professional or otherwise, who have no idea what they are looking at.

 

You have to take into account the validity of those opinions based on the background of the peers in question, among other things, if you decide to take them seriously. I prefer next day reports, myself. They're a lot more reliable and unbiased, I find (provided you've heard them from more than one viewpoint). If there's little to no footage of which to judge the fighter on yourself, then you have nothing to go on but a combination of these things. Otherwise I'll let the footage do the talking for me.

 

Indeed.

 

Verification of sources.

 

I wrote this in the p4p-thread and it's pretty much where I'm at:

 

It can be critical when considering that the peers were eyewitnesses, sparring partners and opponents of this old timers at their bests. Beyond that, they frequently had movie film to study, generally better quality footage than videotape or clips on the inter-net. Tyson's high opinion of Dempsey comes from hours of frame by frame study of pristine movie film stock.

 

I will second duo on that.
Sometimes there are certain nuances you cant get from videos or writers second hand research.
First hand evidence really counts for a lot if it is generally unanimous.
Its hard to appreciate fully the aura of tyson for instance unless you got up at 4am to watch his fights live,and without the hindsight of how his career ended up.
And you cant ignore first hand reports when folks unanimously say Greb,ray robinson and dempsey were super greats.

 

These points are why I hate making ATG ranking lists. There are too many variables that are unknown.

 

If there is limited or no film on a fighter, peer evaluation is important.

However it is only one part of the equations. Ring records, solid news paper reports, and careful examination of the conditions of the fighters are a must too.

 

Course it is important.

If you find someone who is an excellent judge of fighter like say Eddie Futch, his opinion carries a lot of weight.

 

But I also see Moore as an excellent judge. But him no mentionening Charles as one of the best he's faced is hard to take as a proffesional opinion. Most who's been around the game is like that.

Foreman loves to give his opinion on the ones he's faced; problem is that he changes his tune every time.

 

Yeh, I think with anything you can't take your sources as complete truth and have to either use other sources to verify or de-verify or take alook at the source and see how reliable it is.

 

In the historic sciences there is the principle that every primary source has to be looked at critically, that its worth must be evaluated. I think same must apply here.