WBO light welterweight champion Terence Crawford (27-0, 19 KOs) failed to get the Manny Pacquiao fight on April 9th after being passed over by WBO welterweight champion Tim “Desert Storm” Bradley. Instead of getting the Pacquiao fight and making a huge killing, it’s looking like Crawford, 28, will need to settle for a fight against lightweight Hank Lundy (26-5-1, 13 KOs) on February 27th on HBO at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Talk about your let downs. This is roughly the same type of opponent that Crawford beat last October in stopping lightweight Dierry Jean (29-2, 20 KOs) in the 10th round. The 32-year-old Lundy isn’t exactly deserving of a world title shot right now, unless you consider someone having lost 2 out of their last 3 fights as deserving for a title shot.
That kind of lowers standards for title shots when someone backs into a title fight with a recent record like that. Lundy was recently beaten by Mauricio Herrera and Thomas Dulorme. Lundy was also beaten by Viktor Postol and Raymundo Beltran in the past. Crawford has wins over Dulorme and Beltran. If Top Rank is going to pool from guys in the lower weights for Crawford’s opponents, then they should at least get the guys that beat Lundy rather than Lundy himself. I’m just saying.
Lundy is ranked #8 by the WBC at lightweight.
If the idea is for Top Rank to turn Crawford into a star, then they’re going about it the wrong way. Instead of putting him in with smaller guys than himself like Dierry Jean, Lundy and Yuriorkis Gamboa, they need to at least put him in with light welterweights. Ideally, they need to have Crawford move up in weight to the 147lb division so that he can look for bigger money fights in that weight class.
It would mean that he would have to target the IBF, WBA or WBC titles, because he’s not going to fight his friend Tim Bradley, who holds the WBO welterweight title. I’m not sure if Crawford has the frame to stand up to big power shots from guys like Keith Thurman, Danny Garcia or Shawn Porter.
Crawford was getting hit plenty by the smaller Dierry Jean. If you put Crawford in with guys that are actually his size or bigger, I’m not sure if he’ll be able to hold up under that kind of pounding. Someone like Errol Spence would likely walk right through Crawford and KO him fairly quickly.
Crawford seems too thin-boned to take on a sturdy welterweight with size and power. I think he would do well against an old, pumped up super featherweight like Manny Pacquiao, but not a legitimate welterweight like Spence, Shawn Porter or Thurman. Those guys have too much size and power.