Ok. Not a good fight, as the announcers were trying to sell it, but fun enough. Probably the best possible outcome for boxing and MMA, if people thought they saw something fun.
McGregor's smarter than I gave him credit for (as if you should ever underestimate the intelligence of someone making $100M+ for a half hour's work). He made zero effort to knock Mayweather out, just touching him with pattycake arm punches at a high rate. That was pretty clever, after talking a big game about knocking him out, this strategy actually allowed him to stay in the fight.
I wonder if he pulled the idea from De La Hoya, who I thought had a pretty good game plan along those lines as the bigger guy. He just kept firing on Mayweather, even arm shots, and it made that a competitive fight.
Taking big swings and missing dissipates a ton of stamina, so it also helped Connor extend 2-3 rounds past what I thought he could go. He was always going to gas before 12 rounds, so this had zero chance to be a winning strategy, but there was NO winning strategy. He managed to go 10, not get embarrassed, vs either being KO'd or gassing in 4-5 rounds if he'd really chased him around trying to knock him out.
Conversely, Mayweather did exactly what he said he was going to do, and stalked him for the knockout aggressively. Funny that McGregor did the majority of running and holding. Kudos to both guys for doing what they had to to make it a watchable event.
McGregor landed 2-3 meaningful punches, which is 2-3 more than I expected, so good job there as well.
As for the officiating...McGregor's hammer punches were absurd...in a regular match, a fighter would have lost points or been disqualified. As for Floyd "turning his back" I agree with Malignaggi, the bigger part of that was McGregor stepping around Mayweather...that was really bizarre. Floyd was pulling away in the clinches because Byrd was letting him get hit with hammer punchers, and then McGregor would circle around his back. Mayweather landed a couple retaliatory low blows as well, which went uncommented upon. The officiating was really strange.
Glad that's over, and neither sport is necessarily worse off for it. There's a lot of good stuff coming up in boxing the rest of the way.