The optical illusion that is Santos Saúl "Canelo" Álvarez Barragán - somehow, statistically accurate

You watch this guy punch, sometimes he looks downright moronic. Going strictly by eye-test, he racks up so many loaded-up swing-and-miss doozies, by so much distance, that you'd expect Comp-U-Box would reflect a very low success rate. Yet that is very much not the case - alarmingly so, when you examine the cold hard metrics.

When this article was published, he was 23 years old with a 42-0-1 record and had a then sport-leading 42% career overall connect percentage (for reference, Floyd Mayweather Jr. was in 2nd place with 41% ahead of their h2h match-up). That has strayed just over four and a half percentage points in eight years and seventeen bouts since. I believe he's still among the very highest in the game if not still holding onto the #1 spot:

Jabs
4.4/18.3 - 24.04%
Total
11/23.3 - 47.21%
Total
15.5/41.5 - 37.35%

Last night versus Caleb Plant, advertised as a slick defensive boxer, these stats all lowered appreciably to nobody's surprise.

Jabs
15/110 - 13.6% (1 on the body)
Power
102/251 - 40.6% (52 on the body)
Total
117/361 - 32.4% (53 on the body)

He still got the KO, however. Body shots as usual played a major part in his eventual success but even there - some of Canelo's most noticable and embarrassingly hamartial whiffs are thrown downstairs. You often want to grab him by the head and give him a shake, asking "WHY? Tell me why you believed that would make contact? You started an uppercut from behind your lead hip and needed two paces to close the gap between you and your retreating opponent and still didn't come within several inches of their actual torso" and rub his face into a screen with a slow motion replay, as though he were a puppy that did its business somewhere naughty.

His statline on the whole compares favorably on the surface with the per-round stats of Emanuel Dapidran Pacquiao, the other 21st century ATG (one just retired officially several weeks ago with the other still not only active but in the midst of his prime, but we know where the wind is blowing, there...both are IBHOF locks already while Pac at least is ensconced in most top 50 p4p all-time lists, if not even inside half that number on some) who is a primarily offense-based fighter:

Jabs
3.9/25.2 - 15.47%
Power
14.1/32.4 - 43.52%
Total
18/57.6 - 31.25%

Although when you break it down by common opponents, they are fairly close. They have three, incidentally:

• Cotto (Miguel, that is - Canelo also fought José)
• Mayweather
• Mosley (Shane, that is - Canelo also fought Larry)

Pac vs. Cotto 336/780 - 43% ✅ (by eleven points)
Canelo vs. Cotto 155/484 - 32%

Pac vs. May 81/429 - 19%
Canelo vs. May 117/526 - 22% ✅ (by three points)

Pac vs. Mosley 224/727 - 31%
Canelo vs. Mosley 348/673 - 52% ✅ (by twenty-one points)

There are caveats for the pair of wider disparities. Pac fought a Cotto still very much recovering from his brutal first professional defeat at the (perhaps illegally plastered) hands of Antonio Margarito, and coming rather freshly off a grueling physical long-haul contest with a bull-strong Josh Clottey wherein he sustained a cut from a headbutt. Canelo also fought Sugar Shane after Pac did, which is important as in those days SSM was in a tailspin of deterioration from fight to fight (looking stellar against Margarito, then okay for a few rounds against Mayweather, then like total ass in the Mora draw and Pacquiao loss and even worse against Canelo) and coming directly off that Pac loss with a year's rust in between. The best indicator above is their performances against PBF, whose form remained fairly consistent in those las few regularly active years of his career, with only the pair of Maidana fights buffering his defeats of Canelo and Pac (which, tellingly, were marked by a VAST improvement from Maidana I heading into the rematch, indicating that he was very much not on a decline in form). The defensive master pretty much made both look foolish at times, with the Mexican throwing and landing more (and at a slightly higher percentage) but also losing more rounds than the Filipino. Floyd was always a vial of truth serum on legs - if you have bad punching aim, and you fight him, that's going to be very dramatically exposed. And so it was with both of them posting paltry numbers for being pound-for-pound rated talents.

I'll maintain that I think Pacquiao has better aim, however. In headhunting in particular, because he simply never did focus all that much on body-punching. That is, meanwhile, an integral part of Canelo's offense and if you take it away he probably doesn't have a good few of the victories that he does. He breaks opponents down with body shots, and he lands the ones that he does by just playing the law of averages throwing full-bore downstairs with maximum power, taking advantage of his by now fully rectified and elite stamina (ironically, something that was a considered a weakness in his early prospect days). Álvarez doesn't mind how badly some of his shots miss, or how bad they make him look, or even what sort of compromised position they may put him in for counters (because of his quick reflexes, and having a reliable chin to fall back on). He'll gladly burn a majority of his attempts to land on an opponent's midsection, knowing that eventually he'll get a piece if he keeps plodding forward, gunning hard and playing the law of averages. Then when he does so, his opponents' energy begins to flag and opportunities to land power shots upstairs open up as their legs slow and their hands come down. There is a method to his madness, even if the process is sometimes ugly.

tl:dr - he has better accuracy on paper than he has any business having, but there's a reason for his wanton wastefulness. This has been neither a hatchet job nor a panegyric but a neutral analysis, which is why nuthuggers and haters are going to each hate it.

 

Lara held Canelo to about the same percentage (on a bit less thrown and landed) as Mayweather.

Álvarez total versus Lara
97/415 - 23%

Álvarez jabs versus Lara
9/183 - 5%

Álvarez power versus Lara
88/232 - 38%

Now of course, 38% of your power shots actually doesn't sound bad, until you realize that at least half of those were grazing body shots, barely making contact with Álvarez chasing and lunging but still 'counted' by the Comp-U-Box team even if just a molecule of his glove kissed one cell of Lara's epidermis.

Look at that jabbing profligacy, though. Canelo threw almost two hundred jabs, and his connects were in the single digits.

If you have 12 rounds of evasive movement in you, making Canelo miss horribly and look awful is quite possible. If you aren't very slick, however (gotta be Mayweather or Lara tier - merely Plant or Saunders tier won't cut it) you might still get worn down and taken out anyway, because he DGAF. He'll be as wasteful and unaesthetic as he needs until you do catch those hands.

 

Thanks, it feels like an incomplete project, because it was (I had been drafting it but had to run to catch a bus to see Marvel's Eternals w/ my brother, and had some hastily finished paragraphs before clicking "submit", without having a chance to proofread and tie it all together more coherently) but I didn't feel like just leaving the draft after getting it most of the way done.