If you want to say that Anderson Silva and Jon Jones are not GOAT status because of steroid usage, that is fine, we are all entitled to our unreasonable religious superiority beliefs. However, logically, it doesn't make sense.
My question is this, how much down the ranking does steroid usage demote a fighter? It is easy to say "GSP is the GOAT over Jon Jones, because GSP never tested positive for steroids." Fine. But what about a guy like Paul Craig who has a record of 1-2 in the UFC, is he also better than Jon Jones because he has never tested positive for steroids?
How many of you can seriously say Paul Craig and CB Dollaway are more deserving of GOAT status than Jon Jones, because they never tested positive for steroids?
If you can't say it with confidence, then steroids don't affect GOAT talk. If you can say it with confidence, then we have to agree that GOAT talk is not based on fighting ability.
slippery slope...look it up. Just because GSP can be elevated above Jones in GOAT talk, due to Jones' cheating, it does not follow that it elevates c-level fighters above Jones.
The gap between GSP and Jones in GOAT talk was marginal to begin with...the gap remains HUGE between Jones and CB or Craig, regardless of the juicing.
Consider this: a track star consistently runs sub 10-second 100m races, edging out his star peers by mere tenths of a second...while another track athlete has never broken 11 seconds (never mind 10).
Then we find out that first one started juicing at some point and it improved their times by an average of 0.50 seconds, with relatively little deviation.
We can exempt that person from 'greatness', due to their cheating, without implying that the other athlete is now "better" than them in any way. Even without the juice, the first person would STILL be faster, and is therefore the better performer...i.e. they just would not have achieved "star" status with the even faster times if they didn't juice.
how does this relate? Virtually NO ONE would suggest that any amount of juicing is going to make CB Dolloway as good a fighter as Jon Jones...the gap between them is simply too wide from the start. Juicing may have widened that gap, and it may have allowed Jon to dominate his peers, but it's absence does not eliminate the gap between him and CB...i.e. Jon Jones can be eliminated from GOAT talk without elevating CB above him, as Jones is simply the better fighter regardless and CB still does not belong in GOAT discussions.
Where it makes a difference is when that cheating drops someone below the 2nd place person (or if it drops them below a number of people). The difficulty is that we can't so easily measure 'greatness' in MMA the way we can measure track times and the improvement in times that juicing appears to grant, so the debate becomes muddied and imperfect.
Does Jones juicing mean that CB is above him in GOAT convos? No...but it might mean that someone like GSP could move above him, as the gap between them was academic to begin with...Jones' cheating makes a much more convincing argument for elevating GSP above him.
