You cannot rank a prospect inside the Top 3 in his division before he's fought...

...someone in the Top 10 in that division. In fact, I'd go as far as to say you couldn't say for certain a fighter belonged to the Top 10 in his division before he beat someone in the top 20 in that division, most of the time.

To me that's obvious; to many here on ESB, it's not!

No matter how good a prospect looks against C level opposition, until he faces a couple of fighters with varying styles who are B- AT LEAST, you cannot more than guess what his potential migh be.

Yeah, it's great to hype young prospects, so that everyone catches on to them and watches them develop, but claiming that they are p4p material or that they're the best in their division before they've fought Top 10 or, in some cases, Top 20 (B- or better) level opposition is MAD!

...just had to get that off my chest...:!:

 

Why not No.1?

And how good is he at 175 lbs?

 

One thing is to joke, another thing to really believe it!:nut

 

Yeah, but the difference is that the abcs only rank fighters that are not beltholders and that are not on direct track to have a shot at a belt with another abc. Also, they seem to want to give all their ranked fighters a go at a title shot eventally. Thus, even if a fighter who has lost is better than a prospect, the prospect goes up and the beaten contender goes down, to give the prospect a shot...this is how they try to please everyone. But posters don't have to please anyone...they can rank anyone they want any way they chose...and still they have unwarranted ranking, which moreover, crazily, they also try to defend!:nut

 

It depends how much of a jump in weight they make, surely. It's fairly easy to predict what Guzman might be like 5 lbs up and to a certain extent what Haye might be like 20 lb up given their performance at the lower weight...but it would be difficult to predict what Pavlik's power and speed might be like at 175 lbs based on his performance at 160 lbs, I think.

With Haye the question is: will he be able to take a punch from a 250 lbs guy who can really bang e.g. Peter? Well...we can guess he might not be able to take Peter's best punch...but we just cannot be certain. Before Haye faces a decent Top 10 puncher of sorts, we just cannot tell whether he is for real at HW, I think. Still, I think we can be more certain that Haye might be Top 10 at HW based on his performance at CW than we can be that a HW prospect who has never been with anyone in the Top 20 might belong to the top 10...I think.

 

How do you know Froch is not better? Since you have no way of establishing he might be as good as No.2, how can you be so sure he's not in fact better than Kessler?:huh