Welcome to the first installment of Innovations in Sports.  These articles will offer suggestions on how a sport can be improves in one way or another.  Some will be more practical whereas others will be less realistic and more satirical.  Let’s start with a serious suggestion for the sport of boxing.

In the wake of the recent Pacquiao vs. Horn battle the internet has predictably been inundated by the bitching and moaning that follows a loss by any superstar.  The majority of articles are vehemently disparaging the decision while proclaiming some variation of the familiar phrases “this is the problem with boxing” or “this is why the sport is dying.” People as well as Pacquiao’s camp are screaming hometown decision and conjuring up motives for the outcome to the point that the WBO caved and called for a rescoring of the fight.  By the way, they judged the win for Horn to be correct. While I have to agree that this fight does highlight one of the major problems with the sport, the decision is not it.  The problem is the need for vast improvement regarding the lack of statistics that allow a decision to be justified.

Let me make it clear that this article is not about the Pacquiao vs. Horn fight itself, but instead an issue with boxing that this fight clearly demonstrates.  With that being said, I’ll put my 2 cents in and say it is very easy to justify this decision going to either fighter.  I personally scored the fight 114 – 113 Horn giving him 7 of the 12 rounds while awarding Manny a 10 – 8 round for the pummeling he delivered in the 9th.  A couple of the rounds I gave to Horn were extremely close and could have easily been scored for Pacquiao.  All in all it was a very competitive fight and a close decision is acceptable either way. So like I said earlier, the lack of statistics to justify the outcome should be the issue opposed to the decision itself.

Every other major successful sport has began creating new statistics to dive deeper into the numbers in order to analyze the participants and gain a greater overall perspective of their performance.  Whether it be Sabremetrics in baseball or Hollinger stats in basketball, the advanced metric trend has taken over and isn’t disappearing any time soon. For fuck sake we have fantasy leagues and daily competitions with million dollar prize pools based on breaking down the numbers.  I for one love it as both a numbers and a sports geek.  These additional stats can lend support for my point of view when engaged in a heated argument about nearly any athletic subject.  In the modern tech age it’s as easy as pulling out my phone and shoving the numbers in my opponents face.  So my question is why does boxing not follow the trend and create new statistical categories that give you a more complete picture of what happened during a fight?

Typically the only statistics we are provided with are number and percentage of punches landed broken down into power punches and jabs.  Unfortunately clean punching is not the only criteria upon which a fight is judged.  According to the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports (ABC Regulatory Guidelines) a fight is to be judged based on 4 criteria.  These are clean punching (power versus quantity), effective aggressiveness, ring generalship, and defense.  So why are we offered statistics that present information on only some of those criteria?  To me this is a huge issue and often times the reason people cry foul when a decision is read.

The Horn vs. Pacquiao fight serves as a perfect lens to display how misleading these limited stats can be.  This popular tweet from Sports Illustrated relays the sentiment of many who thought Pacquiao clearly won and serves as the main point in most of their arguments.

The guy on the right won. pic.twitter.com/nddfFYOZwC

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) July 2, 2017

These are the CompuBox statistics that undoubtedly show Pacquiao landing more clean punches than Horn.  While this is a very important statistic, it’s also important to know that CompuBox numbers are subjective and are being tracked by two people who are each responsible for compiling statistics on one fighter.  These two people have been trained on what to look for but inevitably will see things a little different.  For example round 1 had Pacquiao outlanding Horn with 10 of 35 punches landed in comparison to 9 of 56 for Horn.  Despite these numbers, all three judges as well as any sane observer scored the round for the Aussie.  He relentlessly pressured Manny and controlled the round with his aggression and high work rate.  This perfectly represents why the current punch statistics do not tell the whole story.

One way that I propose we solve this is to create a statistic called Impactful Punches.  This statistic will track any punch that lands even if it is partially or fully blocked by the defending party (excluding jabs caught by the gloves).  This will provide us with another punch stat that gives us a better idea of what really happened in the round.

Anyone who has boxed at all knows that a shot which is blocked by the arm or glove still can have an impact on an opponent.  If you don’t believe me, hold a boxing glove to your head and have your friend hit you with a right hook.  If you’re telling me that didn’t have any impact on you then you’re a fucking liar.  This doesn’t only apply to shots to the head.  Blocking body shots with your arms is great to protect the midsection but will surely leave your arms more fatigued than if they had not taken that damage.  It’s a great way to lower an opponent’s guard or take away some of their punching power.  These punches need to be recognized and that is what this statistic will do.

Lets go back to round one of the Pac vs. Horn fight to show the importance of this statistic.  Rewatching the round and counting the impactful shots for both Horn and Pacquiao I totaled 30 for Horn and 15 for Manny.  While many of Horn’s shots may have been been blocked to some extent, they certaintly had an effect on Manny and played a large part in Horn controlling the action while pushing Manny around the ring.  Of course my count here is subjective just like any other punch stat but it serves as a very useful tool when it comes to analyzing the story of a fight.  This new stat aids in providing statistics that help display effective agressiveness along with the valuable statistics already tracked by companies such as CompuBox.

Now that we have helped address effective agressiveness with impactful punches, I would like to suggest 4 new statistics that will offer some clarity regarding ring generalship.  Ring generalship is loosely defined as controlling the ring and imposing your style of fight.  It’s hard to argue that Horn did not do this for the majority of the fight (round 9 being the main exception).  That’s why the first stat I suggest is Time Moving Forward.  It’s been a long standing tradition for judges to reward the fighter that is pressing forward and forcing the action.  While again this is impossible to track the exact numbers, it is relatively obvious when a fighter is moving forward and being the aggressor opposed to moving backwards and defending/countering.  I conversely propose that we provide the numbers for Time Moving Backwards along with Time Neutral to offer a full breakdown of how the territory was controlled.  The last statistic I would like to see tracked is Time Against The Ropes.  This is useful in emphasizing who’s pressure was more imposing.  While these stats do not tell the entire story of ring generalship, they do add some measurables by which it can be judged.

Lastly we need to administer some statistics for defense.  I do think the punch percentages provided by CompuBox as well as the addition of impactful punch percentage do tell some of the defensive narrative, but I would like to see a deeper breakdown of these stats.  This can be done easily by adding two additional categories, Missed Punches and Blocked Punches.  These stats would more effectively display the exemplary defense of fighters such as Mayweather and Rigondeaux when you see how many of these punches caught nothing but air in comparison to being blocked by the gloves.  As we discussed earlier, blocked punches still have an impact on the recipient where missed punches have no effect other than fatiguing the puncher.  I don’t think this adds much that the percentage of punches landed doesn’t tell but it is an interesting way to compare fighters against each other.

Typically boxing is very hesitant to change it’s ways but it’s about time that they get with the program.  People like seeing more stats so they can back up their arguments and point to numbers in an attempt to prove why they are right and the person they are debating is wrong.  They allow the fans to get more involved and feel like they have a greater knowledge about the fighters even if they have barely or never seen them fight.  They make betting more interesting and reduce the solely speculative nature of trying to predict a fight.  Most importantly, they give us a better perspective at the end of a bout and allow judges or fans to justify their opinions with a full spectrum of data to analyze.  It’s very difficult to do that when only some of the judging criteria are being statistically tracked.

I truly hope someone with influence in the boxing community reads this and considers my suggestions.  While judging a fight ultimately relies on the eyes of the judges and not the numbers, these additional metrics can assist us in understanding what those judge’s eyes may have seen.  I think it could be a game changer for the sport that helps alleviate many of the post fight controversies that have become far too common, as well as increase the engagement by the fans.  So I relay the same message to the boxing powers that be that the great Jerry Maguire once pleaded to Rod Tidwell.  Please listen and…

P.S. – I’ve been a long time fan of Teddy Atlas but we need impartial announcers for these big fights.  He clearly favored Pacquiao and seemed to have determined him the winner prior to the bell ringing for round one.