Rios will now get the biggest possible fights, says Bob Arum

By Boxing News - 01/25/2015 - Comments

rios9999By Dan Ambrose: After beating up and stopping a totally lost looking Mike Alvarado (34-4, 23 KOs) last night in three rounds, Brandon Rios (33-2-1, 24 KOs) is about to be setup with nothing but big fights from now on, says his promoter Bob Arum.

While a lot of boxing fans think Alvarado was someone who would have been run over by pretty much any welterweight in the division last night given how truly awful and ill-prepared he looked, Arum believe that Rios really accomplished something with his win over the 34-year-old Alvarado and he wants to reward him by putting him in big fights.

“Obviously he’s only going to fight in big matches because he’s one of the big-time fighters that we have around, so we’re going to get the biggest possible fight for him,” Arum told Fighthype.

Just who Arum sees as big fights is unclear, because there’s really only a small handful of fighters that you can consider popular enough to be considered big enough stars for Rios to be involved in a big fight. Arum is probably talking about having Rios fight the likes of Ruslan Provodnikov, Tim Bradley and Chris Algieri.

I personally don’t see those as big fights, but Rios will likely get $1 million or close to that if he faces any of those guys. He made $850,000 for the Alvarado fight last Saturday. The problem is that once Rios starts losing again, which you would have to expect if he faces any of those guys, then it’s going to make it difficult for Arum to justify putting Rios in his “big matches” against guys that Arum works with.

As it is, Rios came into the fight last Saturday night having arguably lost 4 out of his last 5 fights. Rios was given controversial wins over Diego Chaves and Richard Abril that you can really call defeats because he was totally dominated by Abril in their fight in 2012, and he was saved by a defeat against Chaves by the referee disqualifying Chaves for throwing an elbow that I couldn’t spot him throwing even in watching the fight in slow motion.

What we’re probably looking at is Arum testing the waters by putting Rios in with a couple of guys and seeing how he does. If he doesn’t chewed up or totally outclassed like he was by Abril and Chaves, then we’ll probably see Rios back in with Arum’s No.1 fighter Manny Pacquiao in 2016. It’s a pretty predicable move, because Arum likes to setup a lot of rematches with his fighters in his Top Rank stable. But of course it’s going to require that Rios be able to beat guys like Bradley, Algieri, and Provodnikov.

I’m not so sure that Rios can beat any of those guys. Yeah, Rios can beat Alvarado and look good against him, but we are talking about a depleted looking fighter who really didn’t throw punches last night. Alvarado fought like he was punch drunk last night even in the 1st round. I don’t know what kind of training camp Alvarado had, but he didn’t look like he trained at all for the fight.



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