What do the boxrec rankings actually show?

[Finkel]

I hadn't checked them in about a week or so, and I can't make heads nor tails of them. Tried looking at the ratings thread, but it's not the easiest thing to wade through.

To the point: When the two highest profile top 10s look straight up broken, surely that's a red flag that something's gone wrong in the calculation...

The P4P list on its own should raise a few red flags:

1 Saul Alvarez
2 Tyson Fury
3 Errol Spence Jr
4 Gennadiy Golovkin
5 Deontay Wilder
6 Terence Crawford
7 Manny Pacquiao
8 Anthony Joshua
9 Vasiliy Lomachenko
10 Sergey Kovalev

Compare Deontay Wilder @ 5 with Lomachenko @ 9

So what exactly is the purpose of this P4P list?

Then there is the Heavyweight top 10:
1 Tyson Fury (WBC)
2 Deontay Wilder
3 Anthony Joshua (WBA - IBF - WBO - IBO)

So I assumed the propose of boxrec rankings was to reflect current status and resume. Is that not the case?

[Tony1244]

I think roughly speaking boxrec's rankings reflect what a fighter has done, not how good they are.

[computerrank]

I hadn't checked them in about a week or so, and I can't make heads nor tails of them. Tried looking at the ratings thread, but it's not the easiest thing to wade through.

To the point: When the two highest profile top 10s look straight up broken, surely that's a red flag that something's gone wrong in the calculation...

The P4P list on its own should raise a few red flags:

1 Saul Alvarez
2 Tyson Fury
3 Errol Spence Jr
4 Gennadiy Golovkin
5 Deontay Wilder
6 Terence Crawford
7 Manny Pacquiao
8 Anthony Joshua
9 Vasiliy Lomachenko
10 Sergey Kovalev

Compare Deontay Wilder @ 5 with Lomachenko @ 9

So what exactly is the purpose of this P4P list?

Then there is the Heavyweight top 10:
1 Tyson Fury (WBC)
2 Deontay Wilder
3 Anthony Joshua (WBA - IBF - WBO - IBO)

So I assumed the propose of boxrec rankings was to reflect current status and resume. Is that not the case?

Joshua didn't defeat Wilder and lost to Ruiz, or?

[joshj909]

I'm pretty sure the rankings have changed since the calculation following those fights. I'm pretty sure AJ was higher than both of them? Was Wilder not down in 4th?

It looks like they re-instated Fury's points from the Klitschko fight without dropping his points due to the lay off (which they do for everyone else for much shorter lay offs). Take a look at his points following the Klitschko fight and how after 2 years out and a win over Seferi (a rating of 4), he goes up 120 points.

If they have recently changed then they should definitely consider changing them back. They now look a shambles.

It almost looks like they've changed the points system to reflect a personal belief that that's how Fury, Wilder and AJ should be ranked.

[candyslim]

That's the pound for pound list ??? All those fighters are currently active or recently inactive. No place for Floyd M2 never mind Sugar Ray Robinson. Red flags indeed. I know it can't be easy but something has gone very wrong.

[Onetimeonly]

That's the pound for pound list ??? All those fighters are currently active or recently inactive. No place for Floyd M2 never mind Sugar Ray Robinson. Red flags indeed. I know it can't be easy but something has gone very wrong.

They're currently active because it's their current list.

[gilgamesh]

Gaping holes and flaws in the rankings system.

[RonnyJ]

the boxec ranks show that they dont make sense.

joshua faced and beat so many top heavyweights and is behind wilder who faced 90% of the time scrap. makes 0 sense.

having FMJ as the best boxer ever in terms of ranking made atleast sense when boxrec had him 1 p4p atg. the truth is floyd lost to castillo, ducked prime elite boxer and lost to pac, got favours from refs and judges against maidana and was at his prime on nobodys list p4p n1 back than, it was always roy, i remember the times back than very well. so if FMJ at his best cant even be p4p 1 at his time, how can he be 1 p4p EVER. makes no sense.

but on at record standpoint it makes sense, because 51-0 against pac, oscar, mosley, marquez, canelo etc. is very impressiv. so it makes sense. ezzard charles who lost like 5 !!!! of his first 30 fights, how can a boxer who lost so many times considered 1 p4p ever by any means. boxrec makes no sense.

[Blodhemn]

The P4P on here has always looked bizarre. It's not a category that requires points.

[RonnyJ]

The P4P on here has always looked bizarre. It's not a category that requires points.

well, if you get more points for champion chip fights, or more points when you not only fight champions but atg, than points make sense. but the system boxrec has now is ridicoulus, ali outside the top 10

[Paci]

The system is weird and makes no sense. And Im agreeing with RonnyJ about that Wilder is above AJ just plain dumb.

For me AJ is nr.1 contender for Fury and Wilder is number 2.

[margaret thatcher]

Ya, the p4p rankings are as messed up now as I've seen them here, Fury at 2, Kov still in there, Josh shouldnt be in either, and perhaps most glaring of all Wilder coming off a brutal beatdown yet all the way up at 5 and still ahead of Loma, Craw, Pac

I guess under the new rankings Fury got a sh!tload more points, maybe for beating Wlad, so drawing with fURY was big money

[candyslim]

That's the pound for pound list ??? All those fighters are currently active or recently inactive. No place for Floyd M2 never mind Sugar Ray Robinson. Red flags indeed. I know it can't be easy but something has gone very wrong.

They're currently active because it's their current list.

Oh right. Sorry for that. I just think p4p and I think ATG's ... doh!

[Finkel]

I hadn't checked them in about a week or so, and I can't make heads nor tails of them. Tried looking at the ratings thread, but it's not the easiest thing to wade through.

To the point: When the two highest profile top 10s look straight up broken, surely that's a red flag that something's gone wrong in the calculation...

The P4P list on its own should raise a few red flags:

1 Saul Alvarez
2 Tyson Fury
3 Errol Spence Jr
4 Gennadiy Golovkin
5 Deontay Wilder
6 Terence Crawford
7 Manny Pacquiao
8 Anthony Joshua
9 Vasiliy Lomachenko
10 Sergey Kovalev

Compare Deontay Wilder @ 5 with Lomachenko @ 9

So what exactly is the purpose of this P4P list?

Then there is the Heavyweight top 10:
1 Tyson Fury (WBC)
2 Deontay Wilder
3 Anthony Joshua (WBA - IBF - WBO - IBO)

So I assumed the propose of boxrec rankings was to reflect current status and resume. Is that not the case?

Joshua didn't defeat Wilder and lost to Ruiz, or?

Strange response. Didn't really explain what the rankings are meant to show, but okay:

Who did Wilder defeat in your own top 20?
Ortiz (@10) X2

Who did Joshua defeat in your own top 20?
Povetkin (@5)
Ruiz (@6)
Whyte (@7)
Parker (@12)

Just to give you some context your own community at the end of last month voted on their top 15s.

It was pretty much a consensus top 3 of:
1 Tyson Fury
2 Anthony Joshua
3 Deontay Wilder

Please note: I am comparing your rankings to an average from the BoxRec community.
i.e. this is not a sole opinion

Of course no ranking system is going to please everyone. And I acknowledge it is a difficult task

BUT it does seem you have ended up with a list that doesn't reflect reality as most people see it

SO that was why I asked, what is the purpose of the Boxrec Rankings, what are you trying to show?

[margaret thatcher]

The new rankings sure love the big bois, Fury #2 p4p, Wilder #5, Josh #8

Take that bumchenko

[margaret thatcher]

Joshua didn't defeat Wilder and lost to Ruiz, or?

Strange response. Didn't really explain what the rankings are meant to show, but okay:

Who did Wilder defeat in your own top 20?
Ortiz (@10) X2

Who did Joshua defeat in your own top 20?
Povetkin (@5)
Ruiz (@6)
Whyte (@7)
Parker (@12)

Just to give you some context your own community at the end of last month voted on their top 15s.

It was pretty much a consensus top 3 of:
1 Tyson Fury
2 Anthony Joshua
3 Deontay Wilder

Please note: I am comparing your rankings to an average from the BoxRec community.
i.e. this is not a sole opinion

Of course no ranking system is going to please everyone. And I acknowledge it is a difficult task

BUT it does seem you have ended up with a list that doesn't reflect reality as most people see it

SO that was why I asked, what is the purpose of the Boxrec Rankings, what are you trying to show?

The key thing as far as the points go I think is Wilder drawing with Fury, who under the new system had a ton of points going into that fight, so Wilder got a big chunk there maybe?

Though what happened to guys getting knocked due to layoffs?

[margaret thatcher]

Looking at Fury's record, he had more points right after beating Seferi following 2.5 years off than he did right after beating Klit

[margaret thatcher]

I think roughly speaking boxrec's rankings reflect what a fighter has done, not how good they are.

Apparently they are based on correctly predicting fights that have already happened, or something like that. Whenever a new ranking method is found that increases the prediction rate, they change it to that system.

[Finkel]

Strange response. Didn't really explain what the rankings are meant to show, but okay:

Who did Wilder defeat in your own top 20?
Ortiz (@10) X2

Who did Joshua defeat in your own top 20?
Povetkin (@5)
Ruiz (@6)
Whyte (@7)
Parker (@12)

Just to give you some context your own community at the end of last month voted on their top 15s.

It was pretty much a consensus top 3 of:
1 Tyson Fury
2 Anthony Joshua
3 Deontay Wilder

Please note: I am comparing your rankings to an average from the BoxRec community.
i.e. this is not a sole opinion

Of course no ranking system is going to please everyone. And I acknowledge it is a difficult task

BUT it does seem you have ended up with a list that doesn't reflect reality as most people see it

SO that was why I asked, what is the purpose of the Boxrec Rankings, what are you trying to show?

The key thing as far as the points go I think is Wilder drawing with Fury, who under the new system had a ton of points going into that fight, so Wilder got a big chunk there maybe?

Though what happened to guys getting knocked due to layoffs?

It does seem there is a cascade effect based on Fury's points. But it seems pretty arbitrary.

The most recent result was a loss. So I'm not sure how a draw can count for so much.

As I say, if the new calculation kicks out such an obvious descrepancy at the very top of one of the most high profile lists, then perhaps the code needs redoing before it is launched live on the public...

If points are based on the rankings of fighters at the time of the fight, you end up with a top ten closer to the PBO:

1 Fury
2 Joshua
3 Wilder
4 Ruiz
5 Whyte


If the rankings are based on current standing of the fighters they have beaten , then I've already shown above Joshua has done the better work by that standard.


I think you are right in suggesting what it seems the rankings are doing, but again they don't really make sense on that front either:

I guess it can't be helped that a calculation is not going to consider the reality of "the draw"
BUT

a draw followed by a loss to a challenger
Is now better than
A loss to a challenger and followed by a win over the new champion.

That again makes no sense either...

[Finkel]

I think roughly speaking boxrec's rankings reflect what a fighter has done, not how good they are.

Apparently they are based on correctly predicting fights that have already happened, or something like that. Whenever a new ranking method is found that increases the prediction rate, they change it to that system.

The trouble with that, is the algorithm won't be able to take into account the quality of a draw, win or loss in regards to what happened in the ring, whether or not there were bad score cards, whether one fighter dominated the other etc. etc.
So it makes the effort pretty pointless. Leave that to human compilers like the ring magazine.

It also should be made very clear on the home page if that is indeed the case,

because they must know they are replacing a standard for what many rightly or wrongly refer to as a defacto unbiased ranking based on resume...

[Finkel]

I'm pretty sure the rankings have changed since the calculation following those fights. I'm pretty sure AJ was higher than both of them? Was Wilder not down in 4th?

It looks like they re-instated Fury's points from the Klitschko fight without dropping his points due to the lay off (which they do for everyone else for much shorter lay offs). Take a look at his points following the Klitschko fight and how after 2 years out and a win over Seferi (a rating of 4), he goes up 120 points.

If they have recently changed then they should definitely consider changing them back. They now look a shambles.

It almost looks like they've changed the points system to reflect a personal belief that that's how Fury, Wilder and AJ should be ranked.

I just looked into this:

According to SportingIcons on YouTube the day after the Wilder Fury 2 fight looked like this:
1 Anthony Joshua (IBF-WBA-WBO-IBO)
2 Tyson Fury (WBC)
3 Oleksandr Usyk (Cruiser Undisputed)
4 Andy Ruiz Jr (Former IBF-WBA-WBO-IBO)
5 Deontay Wilder (Former WBC)

Now:
1. Tyson Fury (WBC)
2. Deontay Wilder (Former WBC)
3. Anthony Joshua (IBF-WBA-WBO-IBO)
4. Oleksandr Usyk (Cruiser Undisputed)
5. Alexander Povetkin (Formed WBA regular)

As just a snap shot in time, the previous rankings looked somewhat logical. The new rankings look like human bias was involved in tweaking the code to get a desired outcome

[Finkel]

Box rec Light heavy #1 Sergey Kovalev
Box rec Super middle #1 Daniel Jacobs

[Paci]

Box rec Light heavy #1 Sergey Kovalev
Box rec Super middle #1 Daniel Jacobs

[joshj909]

I'm pretty sure the rankings have changed since the calculation following those fights. I'm pretty sure AJ was higher than both of them? Was Wilder not down in 4th?

It looks like they re-instated Fury's points from the Klitschko fight without dropping his points due to the lay off (which they do for everyone else for much shorter lay offs). Take a look at his points following the Klitschko fight and how after 2 years out and a win over Seferi (a rating of 4), he goes up 120 points.

If they have recently changed then they should definitely consider changing them back. They now look a shambles.

It almost looks like they've changed the points system to reflect a personal belief that that's how Fury, Wilder and AJ should be ranked.

I just looked into this:

According to SportingIcons on YouTube the day after the Wilder Fury 2 fight looked like this:
1 Anthony Joshua (IBF-WBA-WBO-IBO)
2 Tyson Fury (WBC)
3 Oleksandr Usyk (Cruiser Undisputed)
4 Andy Ruiz Jr (Former IBF-WBA-WBO-IBO)
5 Deontay Wilder (Former WBC)

Now:
1. Tyson Fury (WBC)
2. Deontay Wilder (Former WBC)
3. Anthony Joshua (IBF-WBA-WBO-IBO)
4. Oleksandr Usyk (Cruiser Undisputed)
5. Alexander Povetkin (Formed WBA regular)

As just a snap shot in time, the previous rankings looked somewhat logical. The new rankings look like human bias was involved in tweaking the code to get a desired outcome

Completely agree. Usually, as far as I am aware, the ratings system was only amended to fix an obvious discrepancy where the cause was obvious such as a clearly terrible boxer ranked top 10 due to some flaw in their system. This, however, looks as if they have changed it because they believe that's how the top heavyweight rankings should be even though this is wrong when judged unanimously even if it is a controversial topic. This wasn't a unanimous flaw in the system. The consequence of this is that they have to apply this same system across the board and it has ruined the rankings in my view. You can't claim the system is objective when it is changed for subjective views.

A key example of this flaw. Have a look at Fury's points changes since Klitschko, then see Whyte's over the past few fights. Although beating higher ranked opponents, Whyte has dropped points. In absolutely nobodies eyes is Fury beating Seferi by retirement better than Whyte beating Rivas by decision. Yet Fury's points went up, Whyte's went down quite significantly.

EDIT: I'd also recommend for people to look at the change in Wlad's ratings throughout his career. Wow. Absolutely abysmal.

[ewenhay]

Wilder drew with Fury
Joshua lost to Ruiz

That's why Wilder will be ranked higher.

Plus every single one of Joshua's opponents have been handpicked, including the one he lost against.

The other guys fought each other when they didn't need to.

Does it matter much either way? Until Joshua fights Fury or Wilder it's a pretty pointless argument.