By Allan Fox: Teddy Atlas believes Terence Crawford will dominate the current fighters at 154 as he’s done at 147, including Jermell Charlo. If Jermell doesn’t return to 154, Crawford’s options for important fights are limited.
Atlas thinks Crawford can win for a while, but he’ll get old soon, and when that happens, his time will be done.
To maximize the time he’s got left, Crawford (40-0, 31 KOs) will need to put himself at risk of getting knocked out at 168 because he’s not going to get the fights he wants at 154.
With Jermell gone and just Errol Spence & Tim Tszyu to fight, Crawford will return to fighting the anonymous scrubs he’d been facing during his 15-year career. Moreover, with Terence fighting once a year, he’ll be gone in two or three fights.
If Crawford chooses to test himself by moving up in weight, Atlas feels he’ll eventually reach his ceiling, reaching a limit where he can’t beat the top competition, just as we’ve seen with Vasily Lomachenko at lightweight.
Staying at 154 will prolong Crawford’s career because there are no threats to beat him in that weight class. Crawford would be the monarch of that weight class, but what would he rule?
No one beats Crawford at 154
“If he moves up, do you think he can beat the 154-lb [Jermell Charlo?” said Ken Rideout to Atlas’s Youtube channel.
“There does come a ceiling of how far you can move up. He’s moved up three weight classes already; how many more can he move up” said Teddy Atlas.
“Lomachenko moved up three, but then he got to his limit. You can see that he can’t go past lightweight.
“He’s different. Crawford’s got a different body. He’s got a different skeleton. You can put some more mass on him because of how wirey and tall he is and how long his arms are.”
The limited options for Crawford at 154 are these fighters:
- Errol Spence
- Brian Mendoza
- Tim Tszyu
- Sebastian Fundora
- Erickson Lubin
It’s unknown whether Spence will move to 154 or follow Floyd Mayweather Jr’s advice to go to 160 or 168. It’s likely that Spence go in the direction of the guaranteed payday against Crawford at 154, then retire after he loses. He would end his career on a whimper.
“So he has a different structure where you can add to it, but it does get to a limit. Obviously, it depends on who the fighter is in the next weight class. I’ll put it this way.
“I don’t see any fighter. Okay, I’ll remove the weight for two seconds. I don’t see any fighter in that next weight class, and you mentioned [Jermell] Charlo as a possibility, is as good as him, close to being as good as him or capable of beating him, and I don’t know that weight will change that. That’s my answer,” said Atlas.
Father time catching up to Crawford
“We’re not talking about going to heavyweight, but another step. Who is there? He is so good. It takes the challenges in his mind to bring out stuff that we had never seen from him before. I knew it was there. I felt it was there,” said Atlas.
“We’ve seen glimpses of it, parts of it, no doubt, but never all of it and her the scary part. I don’t know if we’ve seen all of it yet, and in his mind, he’s probably saying, ‘You’ haven’t seen all of it yet. Give one more challenge and let me open another door in my room,’ because that’s what the great ones think.”
Atlas sounds like he’s under the impression that Jermell Charlo will return to the 154-lb division to fight Crawford, but many people don’t think he will. If Jermell beats the faded, washed Canelo Alvarez twice in 168, there’s no way he will drain back down to 154 to fight Crawford.
“The only thing that rings a little bit to me when you ask that question. There’s one other thing, and that guy is undefeated. Even Crawford might have trouble with him, and that’s father time where that does play in at some point.
“He is 35, 36-years-old and that does play in at some point, but I always say in boxing, you don’t judge a guy’s age chronologically so much by the amount of punishment they’ve taken in their career. How many punches have they been hit? How worn are they?
“Crawford has a lot of thread on the tires. He don’t have many miles on the odometer when you look at it that way. He’s fresh. I wish he was ten years younger because he’s that special. I’d like to see what other continents he could conquer out there.
“What other lands could he go and put his flag into that land and say, ‘Okay, this is my land now.’ You don’t get a chance to see that too often.”
Atlas is short on examples of fighters that Crawford can face to “put his flag into that land.” If it’s just beating Tszyu, so what? That guy never beat anyone relevant.
The only way Crawford can really plant a flag is by fighting these fighters:
- David Benavidez
- Dmitry Bivol
- Artur Beterbiev
- David Morrell Jr
- Jermell Charlo – at 168
- Canelo Alvarez
- Caleb Plant
- Diego Pacheco
