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The Big Question: Who’s the top welterweight, Errol Spence Jr or Terence Crawford?

Errol Spence Jr? Terence Crawford? Who should be considered the top man at 147?

Photos by Ryan Hafey/Premier Boxing Champions and Mikey Williams/Top Rank
Scott Christ is the managing editor of Bad Left Hook and has been covering boxing for SB Nation since 2006.

Last week’s Big Question was a simple one, just a pick for the then-upcoming Errol Spence Jr vs Danny Garcia fight. I didn’t expect it to be a close poll, really, but I was interesting in seeing how many people might have been seriously worried about Spence’s condition coming in, and whether or not it might have a huge impact.

I do think the split was closer, and by a fair amount, than we’d have seen with no car crash last year, and that fight taking place in January of this year as previously planned. But 73 percent still expected Spence to come back with the W, which he did, of course, and without showing any serious concerns about his condition; if anything, he might have had — and said he felt — a bit of ring rust, which you would expect after 14 months out of action. But nothing unusual or dramatic. He was Errol Spence, more or less.

We’ll stick with Spence for this week’s poll and question, and it’s a familiar one. We got into it a bit with this week’s rankings update, which is a situation where I don’t think many minds really changed based on what we saw from Spence beating Garcia and Terence Crawford blasting out Kell Brook a few weeks prior. If you came into these most recent fights having it one way or the other, your mind probably didn’t change.

But let’s lay it out here and talk about it some more (not everyone cares about the rankings or reads those posts): who deserves to be the top dog at 147 pounds right now, in the mythical rankings? (People say “mythical” for P4P like it’s any different than anything else; all this shit is mythical unless the top fighters actually fight each other, which is unfortunately rare.)

Is it Errol Spence, who has the better “strength of schedule,” which is how I chose to put it in that rankings post? Is it Terence Crawford, who maybe passes the eye test even better than Spence does?

I have my opinion, I’ve laid that out. What’s yours? And for this week, while we’ve got the normal “this or that” question in the poll, I’m including a third option for those whose patience may understandably be running out. (For the record, I consider this to be a viable option; I do not consider anyone else at 147 to be a viable option, but you can write them in and yell about it in the comments, I suppose.)

Poll

Who deserves the No. 1 ranking at welterweight?

This poll is closed

  • 36%
    Errol Spence Jr
    (684 votes)
  • 38%
    Terence Crawford
    (732 votes)
  • 24%
    Call it a tie until they fight each other
    (468 votes)
1884 votes total Vote Now

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