By Dan Ambrose: If Antonio Margarito can’t make it for WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto’s next fight on December 3rd at the Madison Square Garden in New York, former IBF welterweight champion Kermit Cintron (32-3-1, 28 KO’s) is the backup plan for Top Rank, and will be positioned in the place of Margarito for a good payday bout for both fighters.

This is actually a better fight than the Margarito one because Margarito doesn’t look like the same fighter that whipped Cotto in an 11th round TKO in 2008. Physically, Margarito looks the same but his power appears to have dropped off dramatically and his work rate has also taken a huge hit as well. Margarito doesn’t average into the 100s anymore in punches thrown per round or anything close to that. In truth, Margarito looks like a mere shadow of what he once was.

Cintron is arguably a much tougher fight if he’s got his head screwed straight and we don’t see any weird stuff in the ring. A dialed in Cintron is hard to beat, especially when he’s letting his hands go and throwing hard power shots. If he can take Cotto’s power shots without going down for the count like he did in his two losses to Margarito then Cintron has the talent to beat Cotto and expose him as being a vulnerable fighter. Cotto still hasn’t really beaten anyone since losing to Margarito in 2008. Cotto’s wins since then have come against beatable Top Rank fighters Joshua Clottey, who Cotto barely beat, and Yuri Foreman, a fighter considered a paper champion in the minds of a lot of boxing fans.

Cotto’s other two wins in the past three years has come against Michael Jennings from the UK and 38-year-old Ricardo Mayorga. Neither of those guys are truly top rung guys and it was basically like lobbing a softball to Cotto. Cintron is a lot better than those fighters and we could see the Cotto gravy train derailed if Margarito can’t make the fight and Cintron is the one that gets the call. I can’t believe that Arum would be willing to put Cotto in a dangerous fight against someone like Cintron. I can see bad things happening to Cotto in a fight like this.