By Eric Thomas: Based on how his career has evolved, winning championship belts in the super featherweight, lightweight, junior welterweight, welterweight and junior middleweight divisions, should Floyd Mayweather Jr. (39-0, 25 KOs) be considered as an all time great in boxing? Although his career is far from finished at this point, and he still has a lot left to prove before he’s finished, is his credentials good enough to match up with other boxers such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammed Ali and Jake Lamotta? There’s the some who would say no, suggesting that Mayweather saw fit to side step around the best in each division, staying away from fighters like Kostya Tszyu, Miguel Cotto, Paul Williams and Antonio Margarito.

For that, Mayweather has come up lacking, instead taking on fighters a shade below each of them, yet still saying that he’s the best in the division without having beaten the actual top guy. However, I’m not sure whether Mayweather needs to waste his time with trying to fight all of the top fighters when he probably already knows in his mind that he’s better. He doesn’t have to prove it to the fans, if he already knows inside that these fighters are beneath his dignity to even bother fighting in the first place. To be sure, I don’t see Tszyu as being able to hold a candle to Mayweather, for he’d likely get beaten just as easy as Hatton did, probably even worse than him.

As for Margarito, he was already exposed by Paul Williams in their 2007 bout, and shown that he can’t take take a fighter firing back at him on all cylinders like Williams was doing to him. Mayweather would very likely give Margarito the same bit of business, hitting him with hordes of hell fire and keeping him too busy concentrating on the incoming shots to get busy with his own monstrous volume punching. As for Cotto, I rate him a notch below Margarito. In fact, I look to see Margarito blowing him out of the ring similar to the way that Margarito did to Kermit Cintron recently.

Up to this point, Cotto has been lucky to have fought mostly marginal competition or those that are on the downsides of their careers, like Shane Mosley and Zab Judah. Margarito is a large welterweight and will simply overwhelm the short, stout Cotto, who won’t be able to come to close to matching the punch output of Margarito. Mayweather, for his part, would absolutely take Cotto to school, by picking him apart with perfectly placed counter shots and jabs. Whenever Cotto would attempt to work his way to the inside, Mayweather would tag him with a flurry, and quickly move away to the safety of the outside.

Cotto would likely get very disparate and start lunging forward much in he same way that Ricky Hatton did in his bout with Mayweather. This, in turn, will leave Cotto open for Mayweather’s secret weapon, his check hook, the same punch that he took Hatton out with. Cotto would walk right into one of those shots, and get badly hurt like he was in his bout with Zab Judah, DeMarcus Corley and Ricardo Torres. This time, however, Cotto wouldn’t be able to low blow his way out of it, because Mayweather would be too sharp for that and would stay on the outside to prevent Cotto from landing one of his equalizers.

Perhaps the crowning glory of Mayweather’s great career is his wins over Ricky Hatton and Oscar De la Hoya, both of whom he totally dominated in the process of getting wins over them. Each of them walked into the fight as being the best in their divisions and walked out with one-sided losses to Mayweather. The best part, though, is that Mayweather doesn’t even fight in their weight classes, yet he was still able to easily beat both of them with relative ease.

There’s simply no one like Mayweather, who if he continues at this pace he’ll likely go down in history as arguably one of the top fighters in history, ranking at the top alongside Sugar Ray Robinson and Ali. There’s no one out there in the boxing world now that can impede him from retiring undefeated and whether he ever fights Margarito or Cotto, it matters not a bit because he’s still shown that he’s a couple levels above them in ability.