Cotto has a lot of options for his next fight – but many of them bad

By Boxing News - 05/25/2012 - Comments

Image: Cotto has a lot of options for his next fight - but many of them badBy Dan Ambrose: Miguel Cotto seems to have become even more popular in losing to Floyd Mayweather Jr. than he was before he suffered a 12 round decision loss. All it took for Cotto to gain stronger standing with the boxing community was for Mayweather to decide not to box him and instead slug with him. This enabled Cotto to do what he does best by slugging it out.

But even with the huge gift that Mayweather gave him, Cotto still couldn’t win. Mayweather was simply too good and ended up beating hi at his own game.

Cotto now can pretty much pick and choose whoever he wants to fight for his next bout later on this year. The options that Cotto has are fighters like Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., Sergio Martinez, Vanes Martirosyan, Austin Trout, Saul Alvarez, James Kirkland, Cornelius Bundrage, Zaurbek Baysangurov, Manny Pacquiao and Mayweather. If Cotto wanted, he could also face some of the best middleweights at 160 if he wanted to look for other opponents. However, I doubt that Cotto would be too thrilled at facing a middleweight due to his lack of size.

As you can see, Cotto doesn’t have a lot of appealing choices outside of Pacquiao, Mayweather, Chavez Jr. and Alvarez. I don’t know that Cotto could get another fight with Mayweather, because Floyd usually doesn’t do rematches when he beats someone. He usually moves on. Pacquiao is a possibility, because his promoter Bob Arum is interested in matching Pacquiao with Cotto.

However, they’ll likely bump into the same problems that got in the way of their fight earlier this year when Pacquiao wasn’t willing to fight Cotto above 147lbs, and wanted him instead to move down from 154lbs to fight him at his weight without Pacquiao giving Cotto a small catchweight. Cotto probably won’t agree to fight Pacquiao at 147 because he knows that’ll weaken him and make it more likely that he’ll get knocked out again.



Comments are closed.