Keith Kizer: fighters who add more weight don't have an advantage

The biggest problem with your study is that it left out very important information about competition level and rankings which the other studies were very clear and upfront about. It didn't try to tell us if they were ranked or unranked or if the fights were sanctioned by an athletic commission or a known governing body. Once you get outside of the top level Boxing can be quite uncontrolled and lawless. It isn't explained if unranked fighters were largely being used just to pad records or if they even seriously trained for their fights. We don't know if they had hundreds of losses or how often fighters that did skewed the results all the way in one direction. The IBF study and the other studies only looked at ranked professionals or elite amateur boxers evenly matched competing at the championship level. It was very upfront about that. In another study researchers found no link between weight gain and fight outcomes in 324 MMA fighters which was a big part of your study. Assuming they used the same methodology for the MMA portion of their study as they did for the Boxing portion of their study we could expect to see more conflicting results like this one. What Kizer's informal study, the IBF study, and the other studies all have in common is that they all independently arrived to the same exact conclusion each time. They all ended up being very consistent about that.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32663387/

From your study: Binary logistic regression was used to explore the relationships among bout outcome [...] between competitors on the day of their bout. So your own criticism can be applied to your own study. Also to your point about the relationship between talent level and weight cutting I would propose an even simpler explanation that many of the big weight cutters are fighters who are too lazy to train all the way down in weight so they train about halfway and just try to water cut the rest of it. This was essentially Marcos Maidana's explanation when asked why he weighed so much against Floyd Mayweather. Its why Ross Thompson came in so heavy against Fernando Vargas. In situations like that I wouldn't say I would describe it as an advantage. More like laziness than anything.

Except for Srisaket Rungvisai all of these boxers come into the ring pudgy and fleshy and you can see where the weight comes back and is stored. My criticism of that is that weight from fat and weight from muscle is very questionable in terms of how effective it actually is in a fight. Just having more muscle weight than another fighter doesn't mean that fighter is bigger in other aspects like frame or bone; they could just be bigger in that one aspect only which just so happens to weigh a lot. Yet its very questionable how much that one aspect will actually even help. The same thing can be said about fat weight. But Rungvisai I think is actually well muscled especially in the legs and thats where all his weight goes. Also the problem with fighters moving up is that, they can always weigh more, but their frames and their bones will never get any bigger. Its not just weight. The type of weight matters a lot. I will agree that there might be some individual cases where sometimes having more weight can be argued to affect the outcome case by case, but only if you agree that there is no universal rule that can be used as a predictor in general. I think in general its safe to expect a fairly even split after it all settles out.

 

Alright I'll leave you to that opinion and I won't try to argue with you too much about it. As for Aaron Pryor I just checked the 140 pound top 10 Ring rankings and there isn't anybody on that list that I don't think Pryor couldn't beat. Even if you disagree, theres no way that Pryor can't win against at least 50% of them, which would be exactly the 50/50 split that Kizer argues for all along.

Just for fun lets consider how Pryor looks vs the biggest weight bully in the division.

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Josh Taylor said he felt like his "legs went away" after 4 or 5 rounds and that he had "zero energy" in his fight against Teofimo Lopez who is naturally the same size as Aaron Pryor. Before you check, this is what 5'8 Teofimo Lopez looks like standing next to 5'8 Floyd Mayweather.

https://www.ringtv.com/wp-content/u...ather-Jr.-Image-courtesy-of-Teofimo-Lopez.jpg

So its hard to picture a Teofimo Lopez sized Pryor also not badly beating a big weight bully like Taylor who has to absolutely kill himself to make weight just because Pryor's muscles don't weigh as much as Teofimo's muscles. Thats really the only difference. And I also don't think Teofimo would be able to beat Pryor just because his muscles weigh more. That might just slow and tire him out against Pryor more than anything.