(Devon Alexander, under stress; via)

Over the weekend, everyone completely lost their sh*t over what happened in the Devon Alexander-Andriy Kotelnik junior welterweight fight. It was rather unlike boxing fans. They're well-known for refusing to see conspiracy theories without any hard evidence; for refusing to write off a talented young fighter who encounters difficulty for the first time in his career; for refusing to think that anyone with a different opinion from them is a war criminal.

Let's review, shall we?

(Just because News of the World wasn’t quite the masterpiece that A Night at the Opera was, would the Ring have dropped Queen in the rankings and disputed their claim to the championship?)

I am excited that next weekend’s Chad Dawson-Jean Pascal bout will officially crown a light heavyweight champion, and the fact that Tavoris Cloud’s decision over Glen Johnson bumped Pascal up to second in the rankings from third means that the fight now meets the Ring’s most stringent standard of its championship policy (the ratings board must make an exception to crown a champion between fighters ranked first and third in the division). This is a good thing. Filling a Ring championship vacancy means that the very best, most meaningful fights are being made in that division, which can only be good for boxing.

However, in the same article on Ringtv.com that explains the movement in the light heavyweight division, in which the fighter ranked second dropped because of a loss (Glen Johnson), there is further explanation of why a fighter ranked second in his division dropped in the rankings, despite a win, and another fighter was elevated, despite a loss.

Devon Alexander may not have turned in the scintillating performance that he did against Juan Urango in his previous fight, but he earned a unanimous decision against Andriy Kotelnik (whose first name I have misspelled about a thousand times in the past, so my apologies to Andriy). Observers were split in their opinions of who won the fight (despite the identical scorecards from the judges in Alexander’s favor), with some preferring Kotelnik’s more accurate, more jarring punches and ring generalship and others giving Alexander credit for his voluminous work rate, power punches and slick movement.

At the end of the day, Alexander won the fight, beating a top-ten junior welterweight for the third fight in a row. Talks are underway for a dream matchup for fight fans against Timothy Bradley, the top-ranked fighter at 140 pounds, for January of next year. Hardcore fight fans knew that, if Alexander did his part and won his fight, the Bradley-Alexander matchup would crown the true champion at junior welterweight.

Fortunately for fight fans eager for the top young lions at 140 pounds to square off, Alexander won. Unfortunately, thanks to a rather arbitrary ruling by the Ring ratings panel, that fight will probably no longer decide the champion at junior welterweight.

With the final stage of round-robin matches upon us next month (assuming they find a home for Andre Ward-Andre Dirrell), Showtime has provided some helpful guides for its innovative and exciting super middleweight tournament -- the best thing happening in boxing in a down year.

First, there's the summary video above. If you haven't been following the Super Six tournament, maybe because you don't follow boxing regularly, it'll get you up to speed. You've missed a ton of drama, a few upsets, a good deal of controversy, a few excellent performances and one Fight of the Year candidate. But there's potential for more of all of the above yet in the last round-robin round, the semi-finals and finals, as the video accurately shows.

Second, the network has released information on its tie-break regulations. It's a little technical, but it's necessary information. Read the Showtime news release on that after the jump.

This is me flagrantly helping the network promote itself, but I happen to believe in the product. Feel free to use this as a forum to sound off on what you're looking forward to for the rest of the tourney, how you see the rest of the tourney playing out, what have you.

Chad Dawson-Jean Pascal on Saturday is about as meaningful a bout as there is on the 2010 schedule. It offers Dawson, a strong contender for the best young American fighter there is today, and Pascal, a Canadian all-action highlight reel who very well could defeat Dawson. It’s being staged in the biggest city in Quebec, where they root loudly for their Canadian fighters but where the classy fans appreciate good performances by all. And it offers something that’s rarer than it should be: a chance to crown an honest-to-God, real division champion, in this case, the light heavyweight division.

The TQBR Prediction Game Hall of Champions has a new enshrinee today, alongside historical fantastical immortals of the past like Spidershark, Pretty Toney, mig(g)s88 and David Schraub: BenOlson, also known as Ben Olson, has emerged victorious in 3.0.

For most of 3.0, the game was all bunched up, where only accuracy separated anyone at all. You can trace the moment of BenOlson's ascension to his call of Dmitry Pirog in an upset of Daniel Jacobs two weekends ago, which gave him an extra 700 points nobody else had. All he had to do was correctly pick the victors in Saturday's two fights -- Devon Alexander over Andriy Kotelnik, Tavoris Cloud over Glen Johnson -- and he would be king. That's what he did. Now he's the king.

Words can't accurately convey how awesome BenOlson is right now. So here's a picture (from here) to symbolize it.

I'm not comparing the rest of us to Nazis, by the way. And statistical analysis of last weekend's fight for the rest of us is somewhat irrelevant right now -- several people wisely made picks they didn't believe in for the purposes of trying to secure a victory. The gamble almost paid off, even for the people who picked Kotelnik.

So that wraps it up for 3.0. Thanks for playing, everyone. Gird thy loins for 4.0, which begins THIS WEEK with Chad Dawson-Jean Pascal. Your slate is clean. Go forth and become an immortal. Or join in fresh if you haven't played before. And start thinking about those new team nicknames, if you want a new one.

Your final standings are below. If you see a tabulation error, let me know so I can adjudicate, even if it's only for honor's sake.

Other fights in the works for Paul Williams, Amir Khan, Antonio DeMarco, etc., too:

For all six judges in Saturday night for HBO's doubleheader, it was a 116-112 night. But for both fights, it was a 114-114 night for me.

Light heavyweights Tavoris Cloud and Glen Johnson produced the slugfest we expected, or a reasonable facsimile of it, but Cloud came out on top in a bout I scored a draw. Junior welterweights Devon Alexander and Andriy Kotelnik didn't produce the landslide for Alexander we expected (except in the waking opium dream imaginings of HBO unofficial scorer Harold Lederman), but Alexander came out on top in a bout I scored a draw.

Cloud got a gut check that will serve him well in the future from gut check delivery specialist Johnson, while Johnson once more found himself on the wrong side of a close decision. You don't get on the front page of The New York Times as a boxer like Alexander did Saturday morning unless there's something extraordinary about you. But Alexander didn't fight very well against an opponent who did him no such favors and instead opened him to valid questions about whether he is as elite as most (including myself) thought, or merely had a bad night against a pretty good fighter.

(A whole 'nother kind of skeptic: David Hume)

I’m all for being skeptical of boxers, promoters and networks. But there is a specific kind of selective skepticism that reeks of bias and cynicism that too often takes hold in large swaths of the boxing media and boxing fandom; it often looks to me like people trying to prove how much more tough-minded they are than the next guy.

Real skepticism, applied equally to all claims, is better. I’ll give you an example: I have no allegiance to HBO (I criticize them in an item below, for example), nor any ax to grind. I do think there’s a big percentage of boxing media/fandom, though, that automatically assumes anything HBO does is terrible. Maybe that’s due to years of build-up of hostilities where the oft-correct conclusion, based on past HBO behavior, is that HBO is doing something terrible.

But it’s a pretty close-minded approach. When someone raises an affirmative claim – “HBO’s decision X is terrible” – my first reaction is to wonder, “Is it?” Because if it isn’t, or at least there’s a highly reasonable case that it isn’t, and I parrot the original affirmative claim unthinkingly, I’m wrong. I’m not more tough-minded than the next guy. Oh, I sound tougher. But in reality, my position is one of weakness. Sometimes, however infrequently for my (and our) tastes, boxers, promoters and networks do the right thing. You can be fake-tough and deny it when it happens. Or you can be take the more difficult stance and acknowledge it, because it’s more difficult to defend something and be accused of over-optimism or naivete.

I’m stuck on this because no one yet has provided me an answer to my challenge about this past weekend’s HBO/Golden Boy Promotions pay-per-view card. I say that the card as put together was stacked, top-to-bottom, with meaningful bouts like no other card I can think of in recent years. Some say people like me fooled themselves into thinking that, with a push from GBP, which admittedly was hyperbolic about things by calling it “The Night Of The Year.” But I’m still waiting for someone to show me a pay-per-view card that had four bouts as meaningful in the last several years. I don’t want to be shown that it was oversold by the promoter (as though that never happens); I recognize that. I don’t want to be shown that the fights failed to be barnburners; I recognize that, too, but it’s irrelevant to whether an undercard is “stacked” or not, because all you can do is put meaningful fights together on paper and hope they deliver.

And I honestly want someone to show me the error of my ways. I’m trying to be skeptical even of my own conclusions here. But it’s hard when nobody gives me a reason – when it looks like they’re just reflexively rejecting things. (By the way, the show did pretty decent business, according to GBP – in the neighborhood of 200,000 buys. That doesn’t prove my historical argument about strong undercards being good for boxing, per se, because my interest was always in the long-term ramifications of a series of good undercards. But it’s ammunition. It’s newsworthy that a card with a headlining bout between two fighters coming off losses did that well. It suggests that if a good number of people are excited about an undercard, it can contribute to sales.)

It's the 6th of the month, a few days after the usual Open Thread launch, but so be it.

To get things started -- and I can't emphasize enough that it's only to get things started, because Open Thread is by the people, for the people, so you introduce topics -- howsabout sharing a boxing video you enjoy? It could be anything: a favorite knockout, something odd, something heroic, something recent, something old.

Then, start firing topics/questions/anything on your mind.

For this month's music pick: a classic. I was spurred to pick it by something I was told by a fresh-outta-college sort in the office of my day job (where, by the way, I've had a tremendous week: a magazine cover story; writing a blog entry for The Economist; getting mentioned by tremendous Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball for a scooplet). She was complaining that Beach Boys songs were going through her head. I replied, "You and I are totally different people! If I had Beach Boys songs going through my head, I'd be completely happy." I think, because of the degree to which the Beach Boys have saturated our advertising and such, a lot of folk -- especially the younger they are -- don't realize how amazing the Beach Boys were, and how they have influenced so many musicians, including inspiring the best work of the Beatles. Hell, when I was a kid, I only knew the Beach Boys through annoying Sunkist commercials. It was only years and years later, when I really got into music, that I discovered what a breathtaking composition "Good Vibrations" was.

Pretty much every band trying to produce an amazing work of art talks about wanting to make "our Pet Sounds," and it's true that it's their best work and the beginning of their most creative period. But before that, there were some Beach Boys gems that weren't surf anthems, which, OK, those anthems could get a bit cheesy. This is the best of them. I practically swoon at how pretty it is.

Twice in the last two weeks, I haven't managed to get a Weekend Afterthoughts column in place early in the week, so once again I'll combine it with the usual weekend schedule rundown, but I'll do better next week, promise. Unless I just scrap the whole dang format. I'm feeling a touch stale with some of the running features. This is some wanky beginning to the blog entry, huh? Screw you, "blog" means "web log" and I had to talk about my "feelings."

First things first: In the video above, check out light heavyweight Karoly Balzsay's sweet KO, which, while pretty good, wasn't the sweetest knockout of the weekend. That honor belonged to middleweight Dmitry Pirog, of course. I've attached a video of that one below, although I can't say I'd expect it to stay up very long, given that it was on HBO pay-per-view. The other thing you can do with the video above, maybe, is check out the highlights of the super middleweight clash between Dimitri Sartison and Khoren Gevor, a nice, solid scrap that started slowly but heated up uncharacteristically upon both fighters realizing they could hurt the other. Universum's YouTube site has the full fight, too.