By Jim Dower: As IBF/WBC light welterweight champion Devon Alexander (21-0, 13 KO’s) likes to say, he’s his own worst critic. Alexander defeated former WBA junior middleweight champion Andriy Kotelnik last Saturday night in front of a home audience at the Scottrade Center, in Saint Louis, Missouri, winning a 12 round unanimous decision by the judge’s scores of 116-112, 116-112 and 116-112. Alexander didn’t look good at all and should consider himself very lucky to have won the fight. Although there are a certain amount of boxing fans that feel that Alexander did more than enough to get the win, there seems to be an even larger amount that feel that he should have lost the fight.

What we do know is that Alexander looked halfway decent for the first three rounds of the fight, but then began to take punishment the rest of the way and was out-punched and out-landed by Kotelnik the remainder of the fight. There’s the belief that the judges gave Alexander the decision because he was the busier fighter, even though he wasn’t landing more than Kotelnik. Alexander was just being rewarded on being busier, period. It doesn’t seem to make sense when you look at the final punch stats and find out that Kotelnik landed with the higher percentage and also landed the more shots in the fight. However, the fight took place in Alexander’s home city and that might account for the judges giving him the decision.

Alexander, 23, vows not to make the same mistakes that he did in the Kotelnik fight. In an article at Boxingtalk.com, Alexander says “It was a D- performance from me the other night and just know that you won’t see another performance like that from me again. Now bring on [Timothy] Bradley.” Alexander is going to have to do a lot of improving if he wants to avoid the same mistakes in his fight proposed fight with Bradley in January 2011.

Besides missing all night long with his jabs, Alexander showed zero power in the Kotelnik fight and you to wonder how Alexander was able to take out 13 of his opponents during his still young career. He threw with decent speed but the power wasn’t there and a lot of the shots seemed little more than arm punches. That won’t get the job done against a fighter like Bradley, who is both faster and a lot sharper with his punches. Alexander might want to take a tune-up before going up against Bradley, because there’s a number of things that Alexander needs to change with his game before he takes on someone as good as Bradley.

Right now, I would give Alexander no chance of beating a fighter like Bradley, and I also think other top light welterweights would beat him. Alexander would have problems against WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan, Marcos Maidana and Victor Ortiz. Those fighters all punch very hard and would give Alexander all kinds of problems. Of course, if the fight took place in Saint Louis, in think Alexander would have a good chance of beating all of them if he doesn’t get knocked out.