I favor Jeffries via stoppage in the championship rounds. Jeffries would win the rematch much more decisively
Jeffries, Jeffries, Jeffries! Roy feints and feints but Jeffries won't fall for it. Jeffries proves to be too strong and too intelligent for Roy. Roy isn't able to set any of his traps because for the first time, Roy is in the ring with another supreme athlete. A man who wrestled hogs at the tender age of 5, drove railroad spikes at the age of 8, mauled a brown bear at the age of 13, finished 4th at the 1893 Kentucky Derby. Jeffries keeps pawing the air without throwing a significant punch. Roy is bamboozled. Jeffries swiftly closes the distance and throws a 1-2-3-2-1-1-2, steps to his right, delivers a mean left hook to the body and follows up with a right hand that catches Roy behind the ear. Roy falls face first to the canvas and he's out cold. Jeffries celebrates by climbing the turnbuckles and saluting the white folks in the crowd. Roy lays unconscious as Tarver uses kosher salt to revive him.
I would actually favor jones at 175. He makes jeff look stupid. It would look like a professional gamer going against a guy who just bought the game and doesnt know all the moves.
Hmm, tough one, Roy was fantastic, but a prime Jeffries was too big, to strong, to durable, Jeff would lose the opening rounds pretty badly but I think he stops Roy before the distance imo
It comes down to whether you think that a win over John Ruiz, is sufficient to make somebody favorite over a dominant champion from an earlier era. To me this seems a highly speculative premise at best. To favor Jones requires a massive assumption of the superiority of his era over Jeffries, and such an assumption would require extraordinary evidence to back it up. In the absence of such evidence, I don't see any choice but to install Jeffries as favorite.
Except that Jeffries "best opponents" were no bigger than Jones or much of his competition, so Jones was largely fighting in what would qualify as a heavyweight field as defined by actual early 1900's standards, especially considering weigh-in vs. fight night weights in the modern era.
The title sounds funny at first, but the more I think about it, the much better chances Jones has. That Fitzs and Sharkey bouts were not good looks. Jones can easily replicate what they did. Even if Jones lost a KO, he would still be embarrassing Jefferies for most of the stretch IMO.
I do not know about this particular matchup but I do feel Roy is overratd as a heavyweight. He only had 1 fight there in Ruiz and picked the right guy to do it. In my opinion, Roy would not have done weill as a heavyweight with his chin and size disadvantage. I think Roy himself knew that and that is why he moved backed to light heavy
I don't see this as being particularly relevant. Whatever the size of Jeffries opponents, they were the contenders because they beat the best men in an unlimited weight class. They were not light heavyweights who only had to fight other light heavyweights. Jeffries himself was obviously much bigger than the guys that Jones was facing, outside of Ruiz. I also don't think that Jones beat the best or brightest at light heavyweight in his own era.
