ESPN's Bold Predictions for 2020: Mayweather will be back; Count on Canelo-GGG III

[Enlightened-One]

"Bold Predictions for 2020: Mayweather will be back; Count on Canelo-GGG III"

In a pretty lengthy article published on the ESPN website today, several boxing scribes made their key predictions for 2020.

Here’s the headline summary of the predictions they made for the current calendar year:

• Floyd Mayweather will unretire
• Floyd Mayweather-Pacquiao II will open up Allegiant Stadium
• Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury go their separate ways (no third fight)
• Heavyweight history (first four belt undisputed champion)
• Terence Crawford will move up in weight
• Andre Ward will return
• Anthony Joshua will lose
• Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennadiy Golovkin 3 will happen
• Vasiliy Lomachenko will beat Teofimo Lopez
• Win, lose or draw against Lopez, Lomachenko will have his last fight at 135
• Manny Pacquiao will win another big fight (against Danny Garcia)
• There will be more joint pay-per-views in the 2020 beyond Wilder-Tyson Fury 2 (with ESPN & Fox working together)
• Lightweight Ryan Garcia will win a world title
• Andy Ruiz Jr. will be on top again
• Gilberto Ramirez will win a light heavyweight title
• Shakur Stevenson will be boxing's next unified titleholder
• Gervonta Davis and Leo Santa Cruz make sweet music
• 2020 will be the last year in boxing for Sergey Kovalev
• Gary Russell will be more active
• Edgar Berlanga will be the game's most exciting prospect
• Israil Madrimov will win a world title

For more details of each prediction, click on the above hyperlink.

Thoughts?

[Enlightened-One]

In my opinion, Steve Kim’s prediction for Fox & ESPN to establish a partnership to co-televise more PPV’s, other than the upcoming Wilder-Fury rematch, is the boldest prophecy.

If this comes to fruition, then this will have an enormous affect on the boxing landscape, as we’ll see marquee events headlined by the likes of Top Rank’s Fury, Lomachenko, Zurdo and Crawford facing their big-name PBC counterparts.

Many of ESPN’s other claims shouldn’t really be considered as being all that “bold”, since a lot of us have already proposed these notions quite a while ago, such as:

• Terence Crawford will move up in weight
• Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennadiy Golovkin 3 will happen
• Vasiliy Lomachenko will beat Teofimo Lopez
• Win, lose or draw against Lopez, Lomachenko will have his last fight at 135
• Manny Pacquiao will win another big fight (against Danny Garcia)
• Gervonta Davis and Leo Santa Cruz make sweet music
• 2020 will be the last year in boxing for Sergey Kovalev
• Gary Russell will be more active

I guess ESPN felt the need to pad out the article with some highly-likely (almost considered dead-cert) predictions in order to retain some form of credibility this time next year!