Should 15 Round Title Fights Return?

[FrenchDeLaHoya]

$90 ppv
$125 mill each
5 years in the making

pac/floyd should be 15 rounds

they make the 12th round look like the 6th anyways

[Bald Shavers]

As an earlier poster said, 12 rounds was instituted in order to facilitate commercials. It happened back when ESPN and USA Network showed boxing regularly (with commercials).

Their reasoning was that by having 12 round championships, the event would be over within one hour. This would make it easy to insert boxing with other shows like sitcoms (usually 30 minutes), news (30 minutes), and drama (usually 1 hour long).

If fights were 15 rounds, it could easily go over an hour and would make it very difficult to sequence fights with sitcoms, news, and drama programs.

But soon after that, many big fights started to be held on HBO and Showtime. The biggest fights were on PPV. These developments don't have commercials and are considered special one-time events. The promoters and organizations should have shifted back to 15 round when this happened around the mid-90's. But like most large organizations, it was very difficult for them to make strategic pivots in response to changing realities.

15 rounds should be brought back for fights that are PPV, and possibly world title fights that make it on HBO and Showtime, which don't do commercials and therefore shouldn't have to worry about coordinating with ads and normal programming.

[boliodogs]

I guess the Korean boxer was killed in the 14th round and not the 15th round.

[Joe Beamish]

I'd like to go back to 15 rounds (but I know they won't), and do away with the huge lead time from weigh-in to fight time.

[Rockin']

I voted yes. They never should have stopped having them in the first place. A Korean fighter was killed in the 15th round so they said no more than 12 rounds. That is not a good reason to me. Stuff happens and a death can occur in any round including the 1st round. Boxing is dangerous and deaths will happen but don't blame it on 15 rounders. In the old days they sometimes had fights of 20, 30, 40, and even 50 rounds and there was no increase in deaths.

you don't understand how rounds were contested in the past, they weren't a standard 3 minutes long.

as well, dehydration plays a major part.

and if you look in to the deaths in the sport you will find that most occurred later in a bout rather than earlier.

and the ones that occurred earlier in a bout were probably instances were a fighter entered a bout with prior head injuries that were not reported.

[boliodogs]

As an earlier poster said, 12 rounds was instituted in order to facilitate commercials. It happened back when ESPN and USA Network showed boxing regularly (with commercials).

Their reasoning was that by having 12 round championships, the event would be over within one hour. This would make it easy to insert boxing with other shows like sitcoms (usually 30 minutes), news (30 minutes), and drama (usually 1 hour long).

If fights were 15 rounds, it could easily go over an hour and would make it very difficult to sequence fights with sitcoms, news, and drama programs.

But soon after that, many big fights started to be held on HBO and Showtime. The biggest fights were on PPV. These developments don't have commercials and are considered special one-time events. The promoters and organizations should have shifted back to 15 round when this happened around the mid-90's. But like most large organizations, it was very difficult for them to make strategic pivots in response to changing realities.

15 rounds should be brought back for fights that are PPV, and possibly world title fights that make it on HBO and Showtime, which don't do commercials and therefore shouldn't have to worry about coordinating with ads and normal programming.

Commercials!!!!! I forgot about that. What a poor way to decide the distance a title fight should be.

[Rockin']

As an earlier poster said, 12 rounds was instituted in order to facilitate commercials. It happened back when ESPN and USA Network showed boxing regularly (with commercials).

Their reasoning was that by having 12 round championships, the event would be over within one hour. This would make it easy to insert boxing with other shows like sitcoms (usually 30 minutes), news (30 minutes), and drama (usually 1 hour long).

If fights were 15 rounds, it could easily go over an hour and would make it very difficult to sequence fights with sitcoms, news, and drama programs.

But soon after that, many big fights started to be held on HBO and Showtime. The biggest fights were on PPV. These developments don't have commercials and are considered special one-time events. The promoters and organizations should have shifted back to 15 round when this happened around the mid-90's. But like most large organizations, it was very difficult for them to make strategic pivots in response to changing realities.

15 rounds should be brought back for fights that are PPV, and possibly world title fights that make it on HBO and Showtime, which don't do commercials and therefore shouldn't have to worry about coordinating with ads and normal programming.

if that were true than the networks would have been *****ing long before Kim died about 15 round bouts. they had been televising15round bouts for 40 years.

they just used it as an excuse or additional reason for bouts being 12 rounds. safety of the fighters was first order.

[boliodogs]

As an earlier poster said, 12 rounds was instituted in order to facilitate commercials. It happened back when ESPN and USA Network showed boxing regularly (with commercials).

Their reasoning was that by having 12 round championships, the event would be over within one hour. This would make it easy to insert boxing with other shows like sitcoms (usually 30 minutes), news (30 minutes), and drama (usually 1 hour long).

If fights were 15 rounds, it could easily go over an hour and would make it very difficult to sequence fights with sitcoms, news, and drama programs.

But soon after that, many big fights started to be held on HBO and Showtime. The biggest fights were on PPV. These developments don't have commercials and are considered special one-time events. The promoters and organizations should have shifted back to 15 round when this happened around the mid-90's. But like most large organizations, it was very difficult for them to make strategic pivots in response to changing realities.

15 rounds should be brought back for fights that are PPV, and possibly world title fights that make it on HBO and Showtime, which don't do commercials and therefore shouldn't have to worry about coordinating with ads and normal programming.

Commercials!!!!! I forgot about that. What a poor way to decide the distance a title fight should be.

[Bald Shavers]

Commercials!!!!! I forgot about that. What a poor way to decide the distance a title fight should be.

Realize that a 15 round fight is exactly 1 hour once you add up all of the 3 minute rounds and each 1 minute rest in between rounds. Once you add the intro and the post-fight and runs to over an hour in a way that would make it very awkward to schedule boxing in between sitcoms, news, talk shows, and dramas.

12 rounds is 48 minutes once you add up all of the 3 minute rounds the the 1 minute rest periods in between rounds. There is an easy 12 minutes for intro and post-fight stuff.

Notice that on PPV, these aren't issues. They can easily have 30 minutes of pre-fight entertainment and introduction and it wouldn't matter because there are no sitcoms, talk shows, news, and drama to coordinate with.

As soon as PPV became big right around the time of Tyson and Holyfield, the organizations should have brought back 15 rounds. But as I said earlier, big organizations (Top Rank, HBO, WBC, etc.) don't adapt fast to changes in their market, economic, and competitive environment.

[Tony Trick-Pony]

I voted yes. They never should have stopped having them in the first place. A Korean fighter was killed in the 15th round so they said no more than 12 rounds. That is not a good reason to me. Stuff happens and a death can occur in any round including the 1st round. Boxing is dangerous and deaths will happen but don't blame it on 15 rounders. In the old days they sometimes had fights of 20, 30, 40, and even 50 rounds and there was no increase in deaths.

I think it's a perfect example of punishing a sport that is not perfect and never claimed to be. Jimmy Garica was killed after 11 rounds. Gerald McClellan became an invalid after ten. Michael Watson after 12.