This week on Friday Night Fights we will do our customary Year in Review, where Brian Kenny, Teddy Atlas, Bob Papa and I give our picks for Fighter and Fight of the Year.

	By stopping Diego Corrales, Floyd Mayweather Jr. proved he was best at 130 pounds.

Two of the best fights of the year took place on Friday Night Fights. The first involved undefeated (at the time) light heavyweight sluggers Julio Gonzales and Julian Letterlough in a brawl that included five knockdowns, and the second matched longtime junior welterweight contenders Mickey Ward and Emanuel Augustus (formerly known as Emanuel Burton) in a brutal trial of wills. In case you missed either fight, we will re-air both of them this Friday (with the less spectacular moments edited out).

The two other logical candidates for Fight of the Year are Antwun Echols versus Charles Brewer, and the Bones Adams-Paulie Ayala rematch. In Echols-Brewer, both super middleweights were on the verge of being stopped at alternating moments in their explosive 2½-round battle. Echols came out on top, but the fight appeared to have been stopped a tad too soon. At the moment the referee halted the contest, Brewer did not seem to be in significantly worse shape than Echols was moments earlier. Minor controversy aside, the fight featured the staples of Fight of the Year-type bouts -- constant shifts in momentum and ferocious action.

The fourth contest that could reasonably be considered for Fight of the Year, Adams-Ayala, was a bit different from the other three in that while it was an action fight, it was not a super-action fight. However, what Adams-Ayala had going for it that the others didn't is that it pitted two top-tier world-class fighters against each other. Letterlough, Gonzales, Ward and Augustus are all good contenders, and Echols and Brewer are probably a little better than that. Adams and Ayala, however, have thus far been a cut above. Adams, the former junior featherweight champion, has been as good a 122-pounder as anyone this side of Barrera over the last two years, and Ayala, the bantamweight champ, made his name by winning two close decisions over the celebrated Johnny Tapia. For hardcore boxing fans, Adams-Ayala was just one flight down from the proverbial superfight. Adams won it, Ayala got the decision.

Looking back to 2000, there were three candidates for Fight of the Year. They were: Marco Antonio Barrera versus Erik Morales, Sugar Shane Mosley versus Oscar De La Hoya, and Felix Trinidad versus Fernando Vargas -- three all-time classics between six of the best 10-12 fighters in the world. Besides that trio of bouts, there was Vargas-Ike Quartey and Ayala-Tapia II, both tremendous fights between top fighters. Conversely, 1999 was a terrible year in boxing. We got the matchups we wanted (Lennox Lewis-Evander Holyfield and Oscar De La Hoya-Felix Trinidad to name the two biggest), but once the opening bell rang, they disappointed for lack of action. 2000 was the greatest year in recent boxing memory not only because all of the fights the boxing public demanded came off, but also because they lived up to or exceeded expectations.

This year featured almost as many dream matchups as 2000, but unlike 2000, the fights generally did not live up to their promise. Yet unlike 1999, 2001 cannot be considered a true disappointment, because the superfights did not lack action. Where they disappointed, they did so because for the most part they were too one-sided.

Compare the best matchups from 2000 (Barrera-Morales, Mosley-De La Hoya and Trinidad-Vargas) to the best matchups from 2001: Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Diego Corrales, Naseem Hamed vs. Marco Antonio Barrera, Felix Trinidad vs. Bernard Hopkins. All six fights were to determine the very best fighter in a particular weight class. In 2000, Barrera proved against Morales that he was the best at junior featherweight (though he was robbed by the judges). Barrera did this in perhaps the best action fight between two top-tier fighters in nearly two decades. Mosley proved against De La Hoya that he was the best welterweight in the world. He did this by turning the tide in the middle rounds of a classic confrontation he was losing. Trinidad proved he was the best junior middleweight in the world by coming off the canvas to knock Vargas out in a fight that was so physically taxing and emotionally draining that Tito cried at the post fight press conference.

In 2001, Floyd Mayweather Jr. proved he was the best at 130 pounds by knocking down Corrales five times and stopping him in 10 rounds. Floyd turned his fight with the guy USA Today and yours truly had pegged as the No. 1 in the weight division, into a mismatch. Barrera proved he was the best at featherweight by dominating Hamed, who was unanimously considered the best 126-pounder in the world. Hopkins proved himself the best middleweight in the world by shutting out and then knocking out the guy who most thought not only the best 160-pounder, but also the best pound-for-pound fighter alive in Trinidad.

2000 was a year of great fighters making great fights, 2001 was a year of great fighters turning in dominant performances. On FNF we were fortunate enough to have two great fights between four good fighters. And truth be told, any discussion of the Fight of the Year in 2001 will ultimately come down to Ward-Burton and Gonzales-Letterlough.

I'll see you, and you'll see them, this Friday.

Max Kellerman is a studio analyst for ESPN2's Friday Night Fights.