By Jim Dower: Former IBF/WBC light welterweight champion Devon Alexander (22-1, 13 KO’s) has struggled in his last three fights to try and get wins. Luckily for him, he’s fought two of three fights at home and won both of the home fights by questionable decisions.

Alexander blames the bad performances on having problems making the 140 pound weight limit, which is why he’s moved up to welterweight for his fight against Marcos Maidana (31-2, 28 KO’s) on February 25th at the Scottrade Center in Saint Louis, Missouri. The 24-year-old Alexander feels like he will no longer be plagued by low energy like he was in his last three fights against Lucas Matthysse, Timothy Bradley and Andriy Kotelnik.

At Friday’s press conference, Alexander said “These last few fights at 140 pounds were hard for me to make weight. I’m going to be stronger and faster at 147.”

I don’t know about being faster, but I expect Alexander to be a little stronger and hopefully he won’t run out of gas after the 7th round like he’s been doing in his last three fights. What he says could be true about him being weakened from tying to stay under 140lbs, but he could find out that he fades just as he did before.

If you look at Alexander’s resume before he started having stamina issues three fights ago, Alexander was facing pretty weak opposition that didn’t have the talent to really pressure him.

In all that time, Alexander only fought one fighter you could consider a threat to him and that was Juan Urango. Alexander stopped him in the 8th round and he didn’t to worry about a lot of pressure in that fight because Urango wasn’t putting a ton of pressure on Alexander. Things changed for Alexander when he fought Kotelnik in August 2010. Suddenly, Alexander was taking heat and he didn’t react well to it at all, tiring out and taking a lot of shots. He won the fight by a hometown decision but not too many people believe he deserved it.

Maidana is a slow fighter that has problems cutting off the ring on quicker guys. However, Maidana never stops coming forward and his pressure has a way of getting to his opponents late in the fight. We saw that with his fight against Amir Khan where Maidana had Khan exhausted and hurt in the last three rounds. Maidana also wore down Victor Cayo and Victor Ortiz, stopping both of them.