Julian Chua couldn’t come up with a more expansive explanation than that Thursday when he was asked during a press conference at MGM Grand why the cruiserweight champion he trains will defeat David Benavidez. It was a perplexing, perhaps telling response to a question that, from an objective observer’s perspective, requires an answer that isn’t at all obvious.

Ramirez’s run at cruiserweight has been impressive.

He won the WBA belt from Arsen Goulamirian and the WBO belt from Chris Billam-Smith in back-to-back bouts that went the distance in 2024. The 6-foot-2 Mexican southpaw dominated Joe Smith Jr. in his cruiserweight debut in the bout before he beat Goulamirian and outpointed hard-hitting former WBA cruiserweight champ Yuniel Dorticos in his most recent action 10 months ago.

Ramirez, 34, is the only unified champion in his division and The Ring ranks him as its No. 1 contender for Jai Opetaia’s title. But this isn’t the cruiserweight division Oleksandr Usyk ran through on his way to becoming its undisputed champion and Ramirez hasn’t accomplished anything to justify thinking he has a legitimate chance to beat Benavidez (31-0, 25 KOs).

Benavidez has moved up 25 pounds from light heavyweight and Ramirez, who is completely comfortable in this division, has never beaten an elite-level opponent. The only time he fought a pound-for-pound-caliber boxer, Dmitry Bivol beat him rather handily in November 2022.

That’s among the reasons most handicappers have installed Benavidez as at least a 4-1 favorite to win their pay-per-view main event at T-Mobile Arena.

It’s also why Benavidez asked Oscar De La Hoya, Ramirez’s promoter, to make this fight for a couple years.

Benavidez realizes his legacy-defining fights will be contested in the light heavyweight division and he hopes to box Bivol after meeting Ramirez (48-1, 30 KOs).

Hundreds of rounds of sparring and good business sense have made Benavidez completely confident that this move up in weight will present less risk.

Ramirez is durable and will put Benavidez at a size disadvantage for the first time in his 12-year professional career. But the former WBO super middleweight champ is significantly slower than Benavidez. He also hasn’t scored a knockdown, let alone a knockout, in four cruiserweight fights and Benavidez’s chin is one of best assets.

De La Hoya questioned Benavidez’s ability to take a punch this week. The WBC light heavyweight champ was officially knocked down during the 11th round of his impressive victory over David Morrell 15 months ago, but their legs clearly got tangled, causing Benavidez to fall.

Regardless, De La Hoya envisions Ramirez landing “a haymaker” that will lead to him beating Benavidez, an aggressive volume puncher who often overwhelms opponents. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence if you’re trying to identify why Ramirez might win the biggest fight of his career against an imposing opponent ranked No. 7 on The Ring’s pound-for-pound list.

That doesn’t mean Ramirez doesn’t belong in it.

Ramirez has only lost to Bivol, ranked No. 5 pound-for-pound by The Ring, and is a unified champion in a division new to Benavidez. As a Mexican who always comes to fight, he is also the perfect foe from a marketing standpoint for Benavidez as the 29-year-old emerging superstar attempts to take over the dates around Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day in Las Vegas.

As even Ramirez’s strongest supporters showed us, however, it isn’t as easy to provide evidence as to why Ramirez might be able to upset the unbeaten, better Benavidez.

Unlike some of the highest-profile fights in other countries — think Tyson Fury-Anthony Joshua in England and Terence Crawford-Errol Spence in the United States — Naoya Inoue and Junto Nakatani are in their physical primes and didn’t wait too long for what’s been billed as the biggest bout between Japanese fighters in their country’s history.

Fans worldwide understandably can’t wait to watch them fight Saturday night at a sold-out Tokyo Dome. It is also well within reason to wonder whether Nakatani (32-0, 24 KOs) will have had enough time to recover physically, only four months, from his bruising bout with rugged Mexican Sebastian Hernandez to be fresh for the defining fight of his career.

Inoue (32-0, 27 KOs) also went 12 rounds with Alan Picasso the same night, but the undisputed junior featherweight champion’s victory December 27 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, amounted to light sparring compared to what Nakatani experienced in fending off Hernandez.

■ Benavidez’s disdain for Canelo Alvarez is to be expected because boxing’s biggest star denied him the significant fight that would’ve most enhanced his legacy and possibly earned him an eight-figure purse. Benavidez went overboard, however, in contending Thursday that Alvarez should fight his friend, Diego Pacheco, not Christian Mbilli, on September 12 in Riyadh. Mbilli at least holds a super middleweight title and has fought another top 10 fighter in the 168-pound division, Lester Martinez, who battled him to a split draw seven months ago. Pacheco is still young and has obvious ability, but the 25-year-old contender hasn’t faced anyone as threatening as Martinez and turned down a fight with Mbilli.

■ Jarrell Miller’s convincing victory over Cuban contender Lenier Pero last weekend was the most credible win of his checkered career. Pero isn’t an upper-echelon heavyweight, but he was undefeated, four years younger than Miller and precisely the type of highly ranked opponent he needed to beat to justify another payday. There is nonetheless no need — and probably no one willing to pay — for Miller to fight Deontay Wilder next. Eddie Hearn, Miller’s promoter, obviously wanted to keep him as far away from Anthony Joshua as possible with the Tyson Fury fight hanging in the balance. But based on where Wilder, 40, and Miller, 37, are in their careers, that isn’t a marketable fight in the United States in 2026. It would’ve made sense at Barclays Center in Miller’s hometown of Brooklyn when Wilder was the WBC champion and fought regularly at that venue, but not now.

■ Speaking of Joshua, we all might’ve underestimated just how careful everyone involved would be in selecting his opponent for the warmup bout the former heavyweight champ wanted before he finally faces Fury.