By Chris Williams: I’m one of the few who thinks that HBO’s use of punch stats is a lousy way of showing who’s winning a fight. That was never more the case than last weekend when Manny Pacquiao was beaten by Timothy Bradley despite out-landing him in the fight. Punch stats are incredibly misleading in telling you the true story of who won a fight. You win the fight by winning rounds, not getting the most connects.

For those fans who still stubbornly think that Pacquiao deserved the win, there are other examples of fights where one fighter outlands the other but still loses the fight. The reason why HBO’s punch stat mechanism is so worthless is that things change from round to round. For example, a guy might finish the fight having landed more shots, but if most of those punches were landed in a certain part of the fight rather than being spread out in every round, then it’s worthless. The only real way to judge who wins a round is by looking at the whole picture in terms of ring generalship, power and accuracy. The punch stats are worthless to show those kinds of things.

Besides that, having humans pushing buttons when they THINK a punch is landed is still not an ideal situation because of human error. There’s too much of a chance for mistakes when you got someone pushing buttons when they think a shot has landed. You also don’t know if there’s a bias there with the person counting the blows. I think there’s too much of a chance error and bias.

This is why I think the whole system should be thrown out by HBO or any television network that uses them. What good is it if boxing fans at home come up with dramatically different numbers than the numbers that HBO is coming up with for punch stats? I was counting shots in the Bradley-Pacquiao fight and I came up with much different numbers. But more importantly, showing how one guy supposedly landed more shots than another isn’t a good way to show who won the fight or dominated. Like I said, if most of the shots came in only a portion of the fight, then what good are they? And if you can’t trust the numbers, then why have them?