Saturday night's fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao is undoubtedly the biggest boxing match in years. The match is expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, mostly from pay-per-view audiences.
But forget about the business side for a second; let's focus on what the in-ring stats say about the two fighters: who punches more, what kind of punches they throw and how accurate they are.
For that we turn to the experts at CompuBox, the primary source of boxing data for clients like Time Warner's HBO and TruTV, CBS's Showtime, Comcast's NBC (the sister network of CNBC), Viacom's Spike TV and BET, and Disney's ESPN.
Pacquiao clearly throws many more punches than Mayweather does, but Mayweather connects on a higher percentage. In recent times, both fighters have seen a decline in their productivity. Bob Canobbio, founder and president of CompuBox, said that "Mayweather's output began to decline in his last two fights, but he's still very accurate." And Pacquiao has thrown fewer punches on average in his last three fights—all subsequent to his 2012 knockout loss to Mexican great Juan Manuel Marquez.
For those fans who don't want to just bet on the fight through a sportsbook, CompuBox is also the official stats partner of Throwdown Fantasy, a boxing-based fantasy game, where users can draft fighters, track their stats and win money.