There seems to be no end to what sports broadcasters will do to fill time, especially in the era of the 24-hour sports network. And while the computer modeling they did in "Rocky Balboa" (2006) is a bit more elaborate than you usually see on TV, even that had a real-world inspiration.

The computer simulation in "Rocky Balboa," which pitted the contemporary young champ against a prime version of Rocky, was actually based on a documentary film called "The Super Fight," released way back in 1970.

That movie took a similar approach, minus the animation, to simulate a fight between history's only two undefeated heavyweight champions: Muhammad Ali (the champ at the time) and Rocky Marciano (who retired 14 years earlier).

Statistics were fed into a cutting-edge (at the time) computer to determine probabilities for who would win. Of course, watching a computer tabulate stats makes for a boring movie, so they combined it with real-life footage of Ali and Marciano sparring to play out scenarios of how the fight could have gone.

Outside of such elaborate exercises, hypothesizing about matchups between fighters who'll never really fight is, in fact, a big part of boxing punditry. If you've ever heard the term "pound for pound," that's what they're talking about — it's an estimation of how good a fighter is compared to all other fighters, not just those in the same weight class (the logic being that even a middling Heavyweight would beat a great Featherweight).

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