By Dan Ambrose: Brandon Rios says he wants to fight Juan Manuel Marquez next. He doesn’t want to see Marquez fight Manny Pacquiao for a 5th time, because he thinks he’s capable of doing the job on the 40-year-old Marquez after watching him beat Mike Alvarado last Saturday night. Rios thinks that Alvarado would have beaten Marquez if he had pressured him instead of trying to play a chess match for 12 rounds by boxing him.
If given the chance to fight Marquez, Rios says he’d go after him. Rios doesn’t say what the outcome would be other than it would be a different one than the one we saw last Saturday night with Marquez beating Alvarado by a fairly lopsided 12 round decision in Inglewood, California.
“I don’t want to see Marquez vs. Pacquiao. I want to see Marquez vs. Rios,” said Rios. “I’ll be a different outcome [than the Marquez-Alvarado fight]. I’ll be ready. I’ll fight him 100%. I’ll charge his a**.”
The chances of Marquez agreeing to fight Rios instead of Manny Pacquiao are zero. Rios has lost his last two fights, and he’s at the rebuilding stage of his career now. There are a lot of questions that are hovering over the head of Rios in terms of his career, and he’s arguably in worse shape than Adrien Broner is right now with his career.
Charging Marquez, as Rios says he would do, could lead to a disastrous result if that were Rios’ game plan for the fight. Manny Pacquiao tried that tactic against Marquez in 2012, and he paid for it by being knocked out in the 6th round. Alvarado seemed mindful of not falling into the same kind of trap that Pacquiao did, because when he was attacking, Alvarado was getting hit a lot while coming forward. The thing is Alvarado really didn’t do much attacking until late in the fight, and even then it was sporadic. In the championship rounds, Alvarado wasn’t put the kind of pressure on Marquez that would cause him any real trouble, and it looked like Alvarado was worried about getting hit with something big.
“I don’t know what was going on with Mike Alvarado,” Rios said. “He was trying to out-box a boxer. Mike was the bigger guy. If he had come at him and pressed him, he would have won…He had Marquez cornered.”
It’s likely that Rios’ promoter Bob Arum will look to match him up against Mike Alvarado later this year once Alvarado’s wounds from the Marquez fight heal. A Rios-Alvarado fight is one of the only big fights available for Rios at this point. Arum won’t likely put Rios back in with Pacquiao due to the low PPV numbers that the fight brought and because of the one-sided nature. I can see a Rios-Alvarado fight being one where the loser of the fight will need to find either a new profession or a new promoter. The loser of that fight would have three consecutive defeats and would be faced with career implosion.
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