Shawn Porter brings something new to the table when it comes to Terrence Crawford, that’s the whole intrigue of tonight’s WBO welterweight title fight. Everybody knows “Bud” Crawford has dog in him. but does he have enough dog to handle a full welterweight former champion who’s been in there with everyone at the top?
But will Porter be able to land at his typical frequency against a smooth operator? If you track their report punch outputs, it tells an interesting, if a bit predictable story of what they both bring.
Let’s start with Shawn Porter. Here’s a look at his last eight fights dating back to June 2015:
The surface level takeaway from Porter’s output has a fairly constant number of punches landed per round. We see dips against the more cautious approached boxers like Broner and Ugas and then an uptick in output in his last fight against the over-matched Formella.
Defensively, we see the same consistency in punches landed against, as Porter is riding a five fight streak of receiving double digit punches landed per round. Isolating his two loses as a title challenger, Porter was on the receiving end of nearly 20 punches per round against Keith Thurman and Errol Spence.
For Crawford’s numbers we’re going to look back to the Viktor Postol fight from July 2016, to keep things equal we’re dropping the Indongo fight from the table because that fight was over before it started. So there’s a bit of cherry picking here, but I digress…
Right away we can see two things stand out about Terrance Crawford’s opponents:
- None of them averaged double digits landed per round
- None of them are elite level welterweights
Offensively, there is a trending decline over time against his opponents. The Brook fight is a bit of a misnomer given Bud was in full control and picking his shots with ease but the trend is there of Crawford taking a more measured approach as his opponents increase in size.
Throwing back, Kavaliaskus came close to double digits with 9.8 landed per round and even “dropped” Crawford when he got rough on the inside – a specialty of Porters.
In the end we come back to the same question we started with: Can Shawn Porter’s size and explosiveness throw Terrence Crawford off his game? Bud is going to have to be a lot more dialed in tonight otherwise the bully could get outbullied.
