Khabib GOAT status compared to others.

[Nickmerc]

Ability wise khabib is one of the best, career wise he isn’t in the conversation solely due to a low number of championship fights

 

[hbombfromhell]

How do you know he's the best fighter? It's not that hard to beat those skinny strikers. I bet Chandler will look more impressive against Conor and Poirier than Khabib did.

Khabib fought one guy built similar to Chandler, you know Tibau. And he struggled with him, some say he even lost that fight.

He has like 5 good wins on his record dude. There are plenty of guys with better wins than him that are nowhere close to being a GOAT.

Eye test tells me how high level his grappling and wrestling are. The best ever in the sport easily. Plus the chin, defence, undefeated record, fight iq, fighting under pressure.

All those other guys tasted their own blood and defeat, besides Jones who is a cheat and arguably lost 3-4 decisions.

 

[PrideUltimate]

Championship defenses don't matter. That's politics who get the belt and title fight. Khabib should have been in title fight long before he was given the chance.
I know injuries held him down at some point. But there was time when he was top contender. Not saying he is only one who's career has been slowed due to politics of Zuffa/WME IMG

 

[Noraaq]

So, people are into considering Khabib as one of the GOATS, in the LW and P4P.

He won the title againts Al Iaquinta and then defended it 3 times against top opponents.

Silva had 15 fight AFTER winning the belt. Not all of them were MWs and not all of them were P4P best, but he fought the best of the best at that time. He looked invincible, even more than Khabib does today.

The same goes for GSP. He did his reign in 13 fights I think.

Jones is another example. That guy is a freak.

Maybe last year and this year no one would beat Khabib and his current abilites have no match in the roster, but to retire now with only 3 defenses and to be considered GOAT is a littler bit too far stretched. People evolve, new fighters come up, they close the gap, they prepare their strategies and train for you more and more.

What do you think, can Khabib be mentioned as the GOAT with the mentioned fighters?

Mods, can we have a YES/NO poll for this question?

Let’s see how many wins it took those guys to get a title shot in comparison to khabib.

Silva - 1 ufc win before TS
GSP - 2 ufc wins before TS
Jones - 6 ufc wins before TS

Khabib - 10 ufc wins before TS

realistically khabib would have 7-8 title defenses if the ufc gave him a TS after dominating RDA and if Conor didn’t hold the division hostage.

 

[Bear Faced Liar]

I can't say how stupid this comparison is.

Silva getting ktfo would be equal to Khabib getting choked out or TKOed during a ground and pound. That never happened.

One takedown means nothing. That would be equal to Silva is getting outstroke against someone, but Silva still wins at the end of the fight, that never happened with Weidman. Weidman beat him, Tibau lost to Khabib.

Khabib got takendown by Tibau, but he still forced Tibau towards the fence and forced the fight, and won the fight in a close fight, didn't get outstroke by Tibau or pushed towards the fence in the all fight by Tibau.

Some other dude posted the Silva knockout/GSP smashed gifs. My response was Tibau's takedown gif, with an explanation that cherry picking 2 seconds of a fighter's worst moments doesn't exactly make a good argument. The logic here is that if you think it is unreasonable to judge Khabib based on the Tibau gif, it would be just as unreasonable to judge Silva/GSP on those other gifs because all of them have done so much more in their careers.

Funny enough, you have actually reiterated my main point with your latest response.

It was only in the later post that I drew comparisons between the 3 gifs. Hbomb disagreed, and I explained my rationale for the correlation. It is your prerogative to disagree, but I have already said my piece and have no reason to elaborate further. You aren't exactly bringing any new arguments to the table that hbomb and others have not already made in this thread.

Except Silva already lost to no names like Chonan, Takese, Azerado before his UFC title defenses. He was never unbeatable.

GSP also lost his first title fight against Hughes not only to Serra. He is also a decision machine, 8 of his 11 title defenses via decisions. He won against Hendricks via Split Decision. Khabib doesn't even have a single Split Decision win in his entire career. All of them are Uninamous Decisions even includes the Tibau fight.

Read what I've posted again. Don't put words into my mouth, I never claimed Silva was unbeaten. My assertion was Silva was unbeaten in the UFC until he got old:

Silva was unbeaten in the UFC until he got old.

Which is 100% true. He only got beaten by Weidman when he was 37. Ditto about GSP avenging his losses convincingly. You can continue posting Serra gifs, doesn't change the fact that GSP had the final say and destroyed Serra in their rematch. If you can avenge all your losses, you have pretty much beat everyone you have faced. I don't see how any objective person can hold those defeats against GSP in the GOAT discussion.

At the end of the day, no hate against Khabib. I will always be thankful that he took Conor's soul. So let's try to find some common ground shall we? I'm going to ignore arguments like Tibau statistically beating Khabib, Khabib killing himself to make weight to fight small guys, GSP being a decision machine, GSP arguably losing to Hendricks, Silva getting thrashed towards the end of his career etc. Those are opinion-based and not 100% objective. Let's focus on what is quantifiable.

29-0 is an impressive number. But let's get real here, the number is padded by subpar competition. Beating multiple "Vusal Bayramov" level opponents should not count towards GOAT rankings. Otherwise, someone who beat 30 Vusal Bayramovs before joining the UFC would be GOAT. I am sure we can at least agree on that.

I am using title defenses here because - hear me out - no matter how weak the challenger is, he still needs to be somewhere among the top 20 to be a contender. If you want to dispute beating top UFC guys as a benchmark, then you might as well check out of the thread now because you are saying UFC rankings are not legitimate. Which makes all of anyone's victories, Silva, GSP, Khabib, Jones etc. arbitrary.

With title defenses as a benchmark, the rankings would be:

1. Jon Jones / Mighty Mouse
3. Silva
4. GSP
5. Jose Aldo

All of them have 2-3 times the number of defenses Khabib had.

I want to give additional credit to GSP for being a bona fide 2 division champ. But his detractors would throw shade on Bisping (who doesn't deserve the BS), so let's drop the 2 division champ argument altogether and keep GSP at #4. We can however, drop people who piss hot for a natty GOAT ranking:

1. Mighty Mouse
2. GSP
3. Jose Aldo / Matt Hughes
5. Ronda fucking Rousey

Even a has-been like Woodley is ranked ahead of Khabib in title defenses. Do I think Woodley is a better fighter than Khabib? Not necessarily. But the numbers speak for themselves.

For the sake of argument, I am going to be extra charitable to Khabib. Let's go by the argument that Khabib has been fighting top level opponents for years, and have been politicked out of a rightful title shot. Since RDA is the first ex-UFC champ Khabib beat, I will count his victory in 2014 as the hypothetical "title shot", and victories after that as "defenses". Fair enough?

But even when we stack the odds in Khabib's favor, he has only 7 "defenses". Which brings the tally to:

1. Mighty Mouse
2. GSP
3. Jose Aldo / Matt Hughes / Khabib

So even with this special advantage, Khabib is not #1 in defenses.

I have no doubt that Khabib has the potential to be GOAT. If he didn't retire, it is very likely that he could have more title defenses since he has cleaned out the division. And nobody knows for sure that he can't be successful if he went up in weight to challenge Usman. But all these are speculations. Who knows what would happen if he fought on? Gaethje might take out his legs in a rematch. Dustin might sink in the guillotine just a tad longer and deeper the next time. A dark horse like Chandler might upset Khabib. We will never know.

So until Khabib un-retires and secures more victories against top level guys, he is not GOAT under any objective metric.

I think I have said all I wanted to here. Nonetheless, you are free to hold onto your beliefs and disagree with me. All I ask is that you do not sink to the level of a blind Conor nuthugger.

 

[PIИKBLIИK]

Well his best win is probably Dusting and Conor a couple of blown up FW's(one of which Sherdog thinks is a bum and hype job) other than that Gaethje who personally I find overatted, I think he has some of the worst fight IQ in LW right now. RDA too maybe, but didn't they both miss weight in that fight? In fact he's had weight issues quite a bit in his career but never tested himself in higher div's which is a bit odd.

I mean if your title run consist of only 2 blown up feather weights, Justin and you won the belt from someone so low ranked he wasn't even eligible to win the title on the night like Al(who he couldn't even put away) it's gonna be hard to be goat, right now only Khabib fans think of him that way and he only just left, imagine in 5+ years...the only thing that'll be remembered is his undefeated record, but I mean Izzy is undefeated and in a better division and is going up to try for a second belt, should he beat Jan and become a MW and LHW champ you kind of can't argue to put Khabib behind him too.

 

[1pedestrian]

He could have been GOAT but unfortunately he retired too soon with only 6 top 10 wins and 3 title defenses.

 

[DarthChen731]

To say that anyone looked more invincible than Khabib is crazy talk



But generally speaking I put Khabib at least in top 10 GOAT discussion, maybe top 5. If he had gotten to fight Tony I'd be a little more confident. GOAT LW at least for me, though.