Welcome to the overview of the weekly S8C Top 25 rankings updates. As always, the complete rankings can be found at the top of the screen. This week a division has a brand new number one fighter and several top featherweights were in action as well.
First, let’s take a look at the featherweights. With his excellent performance in an upset win over Lee Selby, Josh Warrington has ascended to #7 in my featherweight rankings. I know I might take some heat for still having him behind Scott Quigg, but I honestly think Quigg probably still wins that fight. Selby has remained in the top ten, but only barely as he has fallen from sixth to the #10 position where Warrington previously resided. We had another compelling featherweight title fight stateside between Gary Russell Jr and JoJo Diaz. This one came with the predictable result, however, and I left them at #3 and #8 respectively. Nothing in that fight indicated to me that either man needed to be moved.
The light heavyweight half of Showtime’s split site doubleheader was harder to work with following the draw between #3 Adonis Stevenson and #6 Badou Jack. With quality unbeaten fighters in Eleider Alvarez and Oleksander Gvozdyk between them, I didn’t feel I really had any mobility and ended up leaving them where they were. I can’t move Jack ahead of either of them or Stevenson behind either of them, really. In my view all four men are closer to 3a, 3b, 3c, and 3d than 3-6, but that isn’t how rankings work so I just have them ordered by their experience level in the division basically.
Like in the Warrington-Selby fight, we had a world title upset way down at light flyweight. In fact, unified light flyweight titleholder Ryiochi Taguchi was ranked number one in the division prior to the narrow defeat at the hands of South African Hekkie Budler at home in Japan. Accordingly, Taguchi has fallen to #3 with Budler in at #2. This means previously second ranked Ken Shiro has slid into the top position thanks to Taguchi’s loss and is now the S8C #1 light flyweight in the world.
There was more action in the sport’s lower weight classes too. Chiefly, the Moloney twins were in action at home in Australia. Jason in particular scored a big win at bantamweight over eleventh ranked super flyweight Kohei Kono. Super flyweight is deep and Kono is a really solid fighter, so that win launched Jason Moloney all the way up to #13 at bantamweight. I figure Kono will drop back down so I left him at 115, but he did fall from eleventh to #16 in defeat. As for Andrew Moloney, he enters the difficult to break into super flyweight rankings at #22 following yet another win. Maybe most importantly though, longtime top flyweight and previously number two ranked Kazuto Ioka as finally timed out of the rankings after retiring this time last year. Have a good life, Kazuto. You earned it.
Finally, #17 junior welterweight Jack Catterall and 47 year old #19 ranked cruiserweight Firat Arslan both picked up stay busy wins that didn’t impact their respective rankings.
