By Dan Ambrose: If trainer Robert Garcia wants to really help out his fighter former WBA World lightweight champion Brandon Rios (30-0, 22 KO’s), he’ll try to convince him to lose some weight and stay at lightweight rather than make a hasty decision and move up to light welterweight to try and find success.
Rios was recently spanked pretty badly by Richard Abril, but was able to get the win after two of the judges gave what many in the boxing world saw as a gift 12 round decision. Rios said later that he was affected by his struggles to make the 135 pound lightweight limit, in addition to the constant clinching that he felt that Abril was going in the fight.
Rios failed to make weight for this fight, as well as his previous one against John Murray. But Rios is going to find life incredibly hard at 140. There are too many good fighters at that weight, he doesn’t have the speed or huge power needed for him to make a big difference in this weight class.
He doesn’t now, but he will when he finally faces a good fighter at this weight. His promoter Bob Arum is smart enough to know that it wouldn’t be wise to put Rios in with anyone good just yet. It’s going to be a soft target for Rios to see how he does.
It’s going to be a wasted fight because Rios’ next opponent will likely be someone so weak that he won’t give a true indication of where he’s at in this weight class. I expect Arum to continue to match Rios weak until he puts him in with one of the champions at which point Rios will be beaten. The ideal situation for Arum is to match Rios against someone when one of the 140 pound titles go vacant. If Arum can get Rios a title at 140, he can probably keep matching him against the bottom feeders rather than the top five contenders almost indefinitely. In doing so, Rios can milk his title until Arum puts him in a cash out fight where Rios will get dominated by one of the good fighters at 140.