Regardless of who wins this fight, both fighters are inside the top 30 of ATGs

They are clearly the best 2 fighters of this generation, spanning 10-15years. One of them won fighter of the decade, the other was in contention for it.

There have only been 11 decades of "modern" boxing. You can only do so much in an era. If you extract 2 top fighters per decade and even make some of the worst case assumptions such as this era somehow being the weakest of all 11 decades, they'd still be sitting at 22-24ish. Even then, such an assumption is massively subjective.

 

I'm not ranking them against each other. I'm comparing them as a collective against other eras

 

I guess I worded it awkwardly. Top 30 is the minimum either of them ought to be placed

 

Exactly. When looking at things from an objective standpoint, even if you take some of the worst scenarios they'd still be ranked on the lower end of 25-30.

One of the more objective resources available to us this day is the boxrec database. They recently posted a bouts-per-year measure and I took the liberty of converting it to a chart.

http://i.imgur.com/IvTX3p3.jpg

I think it's pretty safe to say that the higher total number of bouts can only serve to bolster an era's competitiveness. Now even if we were to hold each era independently, by factoring out precedence and ease of access to information, I'd say the current era really isn't too bad.

 

Why would I?

 

Not many arguments suggesting otherwise