Bad Left Hook Boxing Rankings: December 2012

The BLH boxing rankings are back, with a little bit of difference. These are no longer just my own rankings, but a combination effort between myself and Ryan Bivins.

The rankings can be viewed here, but here are the top-ranked fighters in each division (there are probably few surprises, but at least one):

Heavyweight: Wladimir Klitschko
Cruiserweight: Ola Afolabi
Light Heavyweight: Chad Dawson
Super Middleweight: Andre Ward
Middleweight: Sergio Martinez
Junior Middleweight: Floyd Mayweather
Welterweight: Timothy Bradley
Junior Welterweight: Juan Manuel Marquez
Lightweight: Adrien Broner
Super Featherweight: Takashi Uchiyama
Featherweight: Orlando Salido
Super Bantamweight: Nonito Donaire
Bantamweight: Anselmo Moreno
Super Flyweight: Tepparith Kokietgym
Flyweight: Brian Viloria
Junior Flyweight: Roman Gonzalez
Minimumweight: Kazuto Ioka

The rankings will be updated once per month, usually on the first Tuesday or Wednesday, but next month with New Year's Day falling on a Tuesday, we'll be updating on January 9.

What I wanted to do was a consensus rankings including our own, plus various outlets, like The RING, ESPN.com, BoxRec, Boxing Monthly, Boxing News, etc., but there were too many problems with that. Here are some examples:

• Not all outlets have the same criteria for things like inactivity. Joseph Agbeko has been inactive for a year with nothing on the horizon, but he is ranked still by The RING and ESPN.com.
• It's hard to set a good, firm date to update. RING and ESPN update weekly, and BoxRec is always being tinkered with, but the monthly stuff can be trickier; a lot of these things wouldn't take into account an early month event like Cotto-Trout until their next issue. We have the luxury of doing that.
• There aren't enough reliable, sane rankings out there to do it the way I wanted to.

So after spending a while compiling all of that and just not being particularly happy with it -- BoxRec's often too-ridiculous rankings (Rey Migreno as No. 9 flyweight!) playing a fairly large part -- and not having enough data to prevent a shitload of ties, I just decided to narrow it down to myself and Ryan for now. Maybe, eventually, we'll have more voters, and expand into a something bigger, or the consensus thing I wanted to do, but for now, it doesn't work as well as I want it to, and I don't want to half-ass an idea I've been kicking around for a while, and see being cool if it can actually work, rather than just sort of work. I'd rather be happy with the two of us and a solid batch of rankings than something I'm not totally pleased with that is better in my brain than in reality.

Enjoy, discuss, debate, all that.