By Dan Ambrose: A fight between former WBO 140lb champ Mike Alvarado (34-3, 23 KOs) and former WBA 135lb champion Brandon Rios (32-2-1, 23 KOs) will be announced today in a press conference in Denver, Colorado.
Rios and Alvarado will be facing each other next month on January 24th at the 1stBank Center, in Bloomfield, Colorado, USA. This will be the third fight between them, and likely not the last. Both guy’s careers have tanked recently, and it’s hard to see where they can go from here after this fight.
Perhaps the best thing that Top Rank can do is just keep matching them against each other without letting them face other contenders, because the danger of them getting beaten is just too high at this point in their careers.
Rios and Alvarado will be facing each other for a third time. Previously, Rios defeated Alvarado by a 7th round stoppage in October 2012. Last year, Alvarado avenged the defeat by beating Rios by a 12 round decision in March of 2013. Rios then was soundly beaten by Manny Pacquiao last November.
In Rios’ last fight in August of this year, he won a controversial 9th round disqualification victory over Diego Chaves. It was a fight that Rios was on his way to losing when the referee stopped the fight suddenly in the 9th round. He ruled that Chaves had thrown an elbow, but you can make an argument that there was no elbow throw.
It was a fortunate stoppage for Rios, because he likely would have lost the fight had the referee not stopped it. The fact that Rios looked so horrible against a guy like Chaves suggests that there’s probably no place for Rios to go at 147. If you match him against one of the good contenders then it’s likely he’ll get out-boxed in the same way he did by Alvarado and Pacquiao.
Alvarado has lost his last two fights to Juan Manuel Marquez and Ruslan Provodnikov. Those were one-sided fights where Alvarado looked terrible. The one-sided nature of both of those bouts makes it pretty clear that Alvarado will have problems in the future if he continues to be matched against good opposition.
It’s hard to say where the winner of the Alvarado-Rios fight will go. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum can always match the winner against Pacquiao, but I’m not so sure that boxing fans are ready to see Pacquiao fight Rios ever again in this lifetime, and I don’t think there’s a market for Pacquiao vs. Alvarado. That’s a fight that would almost surely bring in very few pay-per-view buys.
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