Game Theory - Logan Paul's FIXED Fight (Logan Paul vs Floyd Mayweather)

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the iconic Logan Paul vs. Floyd Mayweather boxing fight! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick Editors:��Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Koen Verhagen, Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi, Forrest Lee and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Introducing our fighters. In the blue corner, we have the tow-headed troublemaker, the assenine assassin, the junkyard mutt who lost 15% of one nut. Look it up. Logan! Pohl! And in the red corner, we probably have somebody who's famous for TikTok dances or something. No, wait, it's an actual boxer.

And not just any boxer, it's the former super lightweight welterweight and light middleweight champion of the world? A guy with a professional record of 50 wins and no losses. Floyd, money, Mayweather? Come on, no, that can't be right. Something fishy is clearly going on here. Oh, internet, welcome to game theory. The show where we give you the old one-two punch of research and analysis and then finish you off with a big uppercut of meta-commentary. Now, theorists, it should surprise exactly zero of you that I consider myself a lover and not a fighter. Ever since I was an elementary aged mat pad, I knew that I was much better at solving my problems with pencils, paper, and protractors than my dainty and, admittedly clammy fists. And yet, it's a little disturbing to find out how much of an audience there is, champing at the bit to see Markiplier rearrange my teeth for 2499 a pop.

Or, if that's not the fight you're looking for, might I instead interest you in watching Logan Paul get punched in the face repeatedly? The former Vine Star, controversial YouTuber, and reincarnated podcaster has, over the past few years. years made the boxing ring his latest forum for lunacy, and I gotta admit these things have actually been legitimately athletic affairs. Don't get me wrong, still don't like the guy, but gotta hand it to everyone who's been involved in these productions. They are way bigger and way better than they probably need it to be. Now, if you've taken the vegan approach to the past few years of YouTuber beef, I'll fill you in real quick. Logan Paul has fought British YouTuber KSI on two separate occasions. The first, an amateur bout in England and the second an official professional fight in Los Angeles.

The first fight was a draw. And while KSI won the second fight in a split decision, Logan had two points deducted for an illegal punch when KSI was down. If he'd had those two points back, Logan would have actually won the fight. And this wasn't just some backyard unplanned hissy fit. These guys had plans. They had training, and they were definitely really hitting each other. If you go back and watch the fights,

it's enough to make you wonder if KSI and Logan Paul could hang with actual professional fighters. Well, we were initially supposed to get our answer to that exact question on February 20th, at least until the match got delayed. You see, that was when Logan was slated to be stepping into the ring against Floyd Mayweather Jr. Who isn't just a pro boxer, he holds the professional boxing record for most wins without a loss. 50 wins, zero losses.

Heck, not only has he not lost, he's only ever gotten knocked down to the mat officially once, and even that was debatable. He was a world champion at multiple weight classes, and while at 43 Mayweather is a bit past his prime, his last big fight was against UFC superstar Connor McGregor, whom he beat up until the referee had to stop the fights. Now, if you're one of those people who finds Logan Paul's antics, annoying, offensive, or worse,

you might be saying to yourself, awesome! A professional boxer is finally gonna give this jerk the beating that he deserves. And while, yes, that might be true, Floyd Mayweather here is no hero friends. He has a long legacy of misogyny and multiple charges of domestic violence, so, you know, the whole thing is just two villains making a lot of money for each other. I'm rooting for a sinkhole to open up under the rinkhole to open up under the Ritz. and swallow both of them into the center of the earth. But failing that, it's still worth asking,

what is really going on here? Is there a chance that this can be a legitimate fight? Can Logan Paul shock the world by being the first to beat the champion of champions? Will he sustain even more of the brain damage that allegedly prevents him from feeling empathy? Oh my god, are you kidding me? Or the more likely scenario, is there something fishy going on here? Put up your dukes friends, because today, I ain't pulling any punches. If we want to evaluate Logan Paul's chances against Floyd Mayweather,

we have to start by talking about the eyebrow-raising size difference between the two of them. Now, you might just think that Logan Paul is a big doofus, and you'd be right on both counts, but that includes being right about the word, big. Logan Paul is listed at six feet two inches tall, and in his second fight against KSI, he weighed in at 199.4 pounds. This puts Logan Paul in a weight class known as a cruiser weight, and barely below the 200-pound threshold for heavyweight. By comparison, Floyd Mayweather is teeny tiny, at 5 feet 8 inches tall,

and in his last professional fight weighing in at 149.5 pounds. A full 50 pounds lighter than Logan Paul. You know what they say? The bigger they are, the harder they fall, so maybe the size difference isn't that big of a deal, but in the world of professional fighting, 50 pounds is vastly different. Floyd Mayweather was most recently seen fighting

in the light middleweight division, which has a maximum weight of 154 pounds. In other words, Mayweather would have to go up four weight classes just to qualify to fight Logan in a professional bout. It's not uncommon for fighters to go up or down one weight class to make a fight happen, but that kind of weight disparity just doesn't happen in normal boxing or mixed martial arts. It's a size difference roughly equivalent to me fighting a sixth grader,

which just sounds like a normal day in the comments section. Badoomching! Self-conscious mid might tell you that size doesn't matter, but simple physics give Logan Paul at a much higher weight a massive advantage, since the force of a punch is the mass of the person throwing it times the acceleration with which they throw. With a 50-pound advantage, Logan can throw punches 25% slower than Mayweather and still hit with the same amount of force. And if he knows his angles and spacing properly, Logan can hit Mayweather in all sorts of places where Mayweather can't hit him back. In my video about the first Logan Paul KSI bout, we talked a bit about reach advantage,

the importance of having longer arms than your opponent, making it possible to hit them at a distance when they can't hit you back. Logan Paul's reach is 76 inches. And though Floyd Mayweather is relatively long arms for a fighter's height, his reach is only 7. That creates 4 inches of what's known as the pocket. And again, it might not sound like all that much, but if you're thinking of boxing as a sport of precision, 4 inches is the difference between grazing someone's nose and reaching through their skull and into their brain. So do we have any fights with comparable size differences that we can use for reference? We sure do, but only in heavyweights because there's no upper weight limit.

A good example would be the 2009 bout between heavyweight champion Nikolai Valuiv and challenger David Hay. David Hay was a heavyweight at 6'3, 217 pounds. But Valuiv, nicknamed the Russian giant, dwarfed him at 7 feet tall, 316 pounds. In the end, 9 extra inches and 100 pounds didn't end up mattering as David Hay defeated the much larger opponent by ducking under punches, moving around the ring much faster than Valuov and scoring on counterpunches to win by decision. So if Logan Paul's size advantage isn't a guaranteed win, that means the fight is going to come down to technique. And that means Logan Paul is in deep, deep trouble against one of the most technically sound fighters of all time.

Start off with a comparison of their offenses. In the second fight against KSI, Logan had two major strengths, his jab and his counterpunch uppercut. The jab, the quick straight punch with the lead hand, is almost always going to be the main weapon for someone with a reach advantage. That was the punch that Logan threw the most in his fights against KSI. And he often landed it pretty cleanly, as evidenced by his advantage in Kambach's statistics from the fight.

Logan landed 28% of his total punches in the second KSI fight compared to KSI's 21%. On the other hand, none of the jabs appeared to do much damage. They just scored points on the judge's scorecards. If you want to talk about Logan doing actual damage, that occurred when he threw a couple of counterpunch uppercuts late in round four, knocking KSI to the canvas. The upper cut finishing move, my friends, not just for Little Mac anymore. So yeah, Logan Paul definitely has one punch knockout power, but it's worth mentioning that the uppercut was there for him because KSI threw a lot of his punches,

like he was trying to pop Logan's head off like a rock'em-sock him robot. That's the kind of position you're pretty much never going to see Floyd Mayweather in because his standard strategy isn't going to into the ring guns blazing, but instead breaking down his opponents and setting traps for them to fall into. Here's an example from Mayweather's 2007 fight against the then undefeated British boxer Ricky Hatton. Mayweather is back peddling towards the ropes with Hatton pursuing him. Without looking, Mayweather knows that he's about to hit the ropes and predicts that Hatton's about to throw a big punch since Hatton thinks that Mayweather is going to be trapped in the corner. This allows Floyd to slip out, throw a crisp right hook, and...

That's probably Mayweather's biggest weapon. If he can bait you into doing what he wants you to do, he can be prepared to catch you with the exact punch that you're going to be most vulnerable to. The signature punch Floyd Mayweather throws better than nearly anyone else is a body jab. Most fighters jabbeds straight to the head and only hit the body in close quarters, but not Mayweather. While these jabs to the body don't feel good, their main purpose isn't doing damage, but rather to lower the opponent's guard down and leave the chin vulnerable. This calculating chess game-style fighting is why a 2012 analysis by Compubox calculated that Floyd Mayweather's connect rate with his punch was 46% best in the world and almost 20 points higher than Logan Paul's rate in a second match against KSI. That means if Logan wants to win, his defense will have to be better than Floyd Mayweather's, right?

Well, there's a king hippo-sized fat chance of that one happening because that same analysis of boxers hit rates also showed that his opponents hit Floyd Mayweather with their punches a measly 16% of the time. Mayweather's signature defensive move is called the shoulder roll, where he angles his left shoulder up to protect his face. his left arm horizontal to protect his body and uses his right arm to protect the other side of his head. When he's using it effectively, it's almost like he has three hands defending him. You can see it on display in his fight against Olympic gold medalist Oscar De La Jolla, where De La Jolla throws about a dozen punches in a couple of seconds, but only like one of them actually connects. All the rest of them either deflect off Mayweather's raised shoulders or on his vertical right arm.

On the other side of things, we got Logan Paul, whose defensive stance was criticized a bit by the commentators in the second fight against KSI. And while he generally stayed out of harm's way against KSI by moving his feet and circling the ring, I have to believe that Logan Paul is going to get caught a lot more often when he's facing one of the most precise fighters of all time, who's been fighting professionals for 25 years. So how is this fight actually going to go? Well, there are two most likely scenarios as I see it. Scenario 1, Floyd Mayweather's experience, technique, speed, strength, stamina ultimately means that he boxes Logan to death,

whether by setting a big trap to end the fight with one big punch, or just by scoring points and staying out of trouble the whole fight. Scenario 2, shenanigans. Doesn't this fight seem a little strange to you? Why on earth would Floyd Mayweather accept a fight against a relative amateur? Someone 50 pounds heavier than he is who's never won a single publicized fight? Well, two reasons, really. First, the clout.

Logan and his brother, Jake, as much as I hate to admit it, are the two biggest things to happen to boxing in recent history, since Mayweather's last fight, in fact, his 2017 bowed against the UFC superstar Connor McGregor. Oh, sure, don't get me wrong. There have been plenty of talented boxers and big matches in the intervening years. But when it comes to increasing search trends for boxing online and getting new viewers, especially younger viewers interested in the sport, nothing compares to the influences of the polls. And Mayweather, being smart, knows that a bout like this will bring him even more clout in the industry,

more public awareness online, especially since it's been nearly five years since he was last in the spotlight. Second, and the most obvious answer, is Floyd's nickname Money. A match like this would obviously be profitable for a lot of reasons, but there's one stipulation here that Floyd might find exciting that you might not think about. Consider this. We know why a retired Mayweather would fight a YouTuber, continued relevance, more money, etc. But why would Logan want to fight someone almost certain to beat him senseless? Getting pummeled by Mayweather is almost certainly going to get him laughed out of a boxing career before his career even gets started, unless of course he doesn't get pummeled. You see, you have a lot of people eager to get into the ring with Floyd Mayweather.

A match against him, even in an exhibition setting, can make a star. Provided, of course, that you don't embarrass yourself. And the thing about boxing is that, well, there's a lot of ways to ensure that you don't embarrass yourself. Boxing is full of matches that are, um, fishy, to say the least. In the early and mid-1900s, the sport had deep ties with the mafia, which has been a hard stigma for boxing the shake. It also doesn't help that recent Olympic boxing results have had some pretty suspicious judging behavior, getting the Olympics committee to consider whether it should remain an official Olympic sport. As you might imagine, any sport heavily connected to betting has a high temptation to fix

fights. But that alone isn't enough. It's also easier to fix a fight in boxing than almost any other sport. Boxing is just two guys in a ring with the winner being the last man standing. It's easy to take a fall and just stay on the mat. No one can ever really judge what does or doesn't happen in a person's body when a particular punch lands. To this day, people still debate that. outcome of Muhammad Ali versus Sunny Liston the second. Sure, you might not know that fight by name, but you definitely know the image associated with it. In this fight, Sunny Liston falls to a phantom punch less than two minutes into the match, only for the whole thing to be called off seconds later.

Rigged, many people seem to think so for many reasons, especially considering Liston's long association with the mafia, and the possibility that he had already thrown the first fight against Muhammad Ali. And making all of this stuff worse is the fact that it's hard to objectively call this sport. If neither opponent gets knocked down, matches are either one or lost by a judge's decision, and points are delivered based on a subjective ranking of a fighter's performance in each round. As I mentioned before, with KSI versus Logan Paul, an extra point or two here or there can easily swing the result.

And when there's no standard of measurement, it's easy to call things one way or the other. So, what am I saying in all this? Nothing. But we do know that both of these men have a flare for spectacle over substance. Logan has repeatedly shown himself as someone with, um, questionable moral fiber. And as for Floyd Mayweather, he's fought some of some fake fights before, most notably against the big show at WrestleMania 24, but he's also been accused of fighting fixed exhibitions before. In 2018, Floyd Mayweather fought popular Japanese kickboxer Tenchin Nasukawa,

knocking him down three times in less than three minutes, despite landing very few significant punches. That fight was also not professionally sanctioned, just like Mayweather's fight against Logan Paul, meaning that even if Mayweather had lost, his official undefeated record would remain intact. So here's the thing. In this matchup, whenever it happens,

Mayweather doesn't lose. He just doesn't. That just doesn't make sense for his brand or for anyone in this case. But Mayweather can go easy on Logan Paul, land enough light punches to get a high judge's score, but not so many punches that it knocks Logan out. And Logan can likewise land a few of his own and stay on his feet the whole time. It's a win-win situation for everyone. Mayweather cashes out and stays relevant. Logan gets the street cred to be taken as a serious boxer, opening the door to other professional bouts with big names in the sport. And to sweeten the deal, because Mayweather is a small. smart businessman who definitely knows what he's doing, he would negotiate to own a portion of Logan's career moving forward.

This makes Logan a star in boxing, and Mayweather continues to profit for years to come. And we know that this billionaire boxer wants to make another billion, only in a different industry. Here's the tale of the tape, my friends. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen whenever these two finally get in the ring together, but let's face it, when two villains go toe to toe, the audience might just be the ones getting sucker punched. But hey, that's just a theory. A game! In as much as boxing is a game.

Theory. Thanks for watching.