By Chris Williams: Last Saturday’s lightweight bout between WBA/WBO lightweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez and Juan Diaz brought in between 150,000 and 200,000 pay per view buys, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN. Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer says “I think it has an opportunity to reach 200,000.”

These are actually good numbers, because there was the thought by some that this fight would end up losing money because of all the stars that were stacked on the card. However, by bringing in these numbers, the fight ended up making money and that’s good news, because fight cards like this need to happen more in the future.

It’s become commonplace for cards to have one good fight in the main event and the undercards to be littered with nothing but prospects in one sided mismatches. The Marquez vs. Diaz II card last weekend broke this trend by having a number of interesting bouts such as Jorge Linares vs. Rocky Juarez, Daniel Jacobs vs. Dmitry Pirog, and Roberto Guerrero vs. Joel Casamayor.

Boxing fans got to see real treat by purchasing this PPV card and saw high quality boxing from top to bottom on the card rather than just mismatches.

The card likely would have done much better had Marquez been put in with a different fighter rather than Diaz once again. After all, Marquez destroyed Diaz only last year in a 9th round stoppage and there really wasn’t much point in this fight taking place. Marquez was coming off a one sided loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. in his last fight and Diaz had lost three out of his last five fights.

It would have been much more interesting had Marquez been matched against someone like World Boxing Association Light welterweight champion Amir Khan instead. At least that fight would have had some suspense to it.