By Scott Gilfoid: WBO middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders (23-0, 12 KOs) says he’s not in favor of Floyd Mayweather Jr. fighting UFC champion Conor McGregor in a boxing match. Saunders thinks it’s bad for the sport, and a fight in which McGregor could potentially get hurt by Mayweather due to his inexperience in boxing.
Saunders’s idea is for McGregor to earn the fight against Mayweather by facing him first, and if McGregor wins, then he can move forward to face Mayweather for a big money fight. It sounds like a nice pipe dream, doesn’t it? The problem with that idea is that McGregor will likely never consider it even for a fraction of a second. I mean, there’s no question in my mind that Saunders would whip the novice McGregor in a boxing match. But once Saunders finished smashng McGregor into oblivion, Mayweather couldn’t fight McGregor any longer. Who would want to see a Mayweather-McGregor fight then? Saunders will spoiled the mismatch for Mayweather by beating his unskilled opponent before he could do it.
The problem is McGregor isn’t going to let that happen. He’ll never agree to something like that, even though it would be a great way for him to earn the fight with Mayweather. Saunders also thinks Mayweather should fight IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin rather than McGregor. That’s another fight that won’t happen.
I think Mayweather would have been dragged into the ring kicking and screaming before he’d ever face Golovkin, because there would be no margin of error for Mayweather. No matter how perfect Mayweather was, Golovkin would catch him sooner or later with a big shot and either knock him out on the spot or stun him badly enough to where he could then finish him off straightaway.
“Come back and fight Golovkin. Don’t fight McGregor because you know what’s going to happen. It could be dangerous,” said Saunders to IBFL TV. “Let Conor McGregor fight me. If he beats me, then fight Mayweather. Even that for me would be a circus act.”
For those who don’t know, McGregor has never boxed before in a professional fight, so it would be a situation where a fighter with an 0-0 record would be fighting the perceived best fighter in boxing. Ideally, there should be a boxing commission that would stop such a mismatch like this from ever taking place, but it’s doubtful that the fight would be blocked.
If one state athletics commission said no to a Mayweather vs. McGregor fight, Mayweather would likely shop around until he found a state commission that would allow the fight to take place. Even if all the states rejected the Mayweather-McGregor fight, Mayweather could take it out of the country to Mexico, Canada or Europe and then have the fight piped into the U.S on pay-per-view.
The Mayweather vs. McGregor fight is going to happen, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. McGregor is going to go into the fight with a 0-0 record, people will pay a ton of money to see it live on PPV, and Mayweather smash him in lightning fashion. I’d like to see how McGregor does against Saunders first. That would be interesting because Saunders isn’t the better fighter in the 160lb division, so it’s not as if McGregor would be fighting someone that is unbeatable in the ring.
You could say that McGregor would have a puncher’s chance against Saunders. I think it would just as bad a mismatch as McGregor vs. Mayweather, maybe even worse. Saunders is bigger than Mayweather with better punching power. He might just jump on McGregor in the first round and take him out like Tony Bellew did with Ilunga Makabu last Sunday night.