By Dave Lahr: If you were thrilled with Manny Pacquiao’s catch weight fight with Miguel Cotto last November, I have good news for you – there’s an excellent chance that’s the next fight you’ll be seeing from Pacquiao and Cotto. If you’re like me, and sickened by the thought of a pointless rematch between Cotto and Pacquiao, then that’s just too bad because it will probably happen anyway. With Floyd Mayweather Jr. possibly stepping away from boxing for one to two years while he devotes his time to his Floyd Mayweather Jr. foundation, it leaves Pacquiao without an opponent for his upcoming bout in November.

Rather than take on someone really interesting like Sergio Martinez, Paul Williams, Timothy Bradley or Juan Manuel Marquez, it’s looking like Arum will be using Cotto as the Plan B for Pacquiao. Plan C will be Antonio Margarito, but only if he can get his boxing license back to fight in the United States. Arum is talking about a rematch between Pacquiao and Cotto if the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight doesn’t take place.

But it’s weird because I used to think that rematches mainly only occur when the fight was close and there’s been a little bit of time between the fights for both guys to beat three to six opponents before meeting up with a rematch. But In both Pacquiao and Cotto’s case, they’ve only fought once a piece since their fight last November. With that little time in between their last fight together, I hardly see the point of a rematch right now.

I know Pacquiao is really into the idea of collecting titles and I know Arum likes to match his Top Rank fighters against each other rather than looking outside of his small stable, but come on, isn’t there anyone else that can be used besides Cotto for a fight against Pacquiao? If I was the promoter for both of them, I’d put Cotto as Plan F and have the best light middleweight, WBC junior middleweight champion Sergio Martinez as the Plan B option.

What good is going after an 8th world title if Pacquiao isn’t facing the best fighter in the division? He already did that at both junior welterweight and welterweight. Why should he not go after the best fighter in yet another division. And to think that Pacquiao already thrashed Cotto. Why would he even both fighting Cotto again when he already destroyed him? If the idea is just to collect titles for the sake of titles, then I guess I can understand that.

But I sure don’t respect that. Why doesn’t Pacquiao fight the best junior middleweight? I seriously don’t see Cotto as the best in the junior middleweight division. Oh yeah, Cotto beat Foreman on Saturday night, but I saw Foreman as a paper champion, a weak puncher who won his title over a weight drained and rusty Daniel Santos. The best guy by far in the light middleweight division is Sergio Martinez.

That’s the guy Pacquiao needs to be fighting if the Mayweather fight can’t happen. God, I am so hoping the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight happens now just so that I don’t have to watch Pacquiao slaughter Cotto one more time before riding off into the sunset. I see a Cotto-Pacquiao fight as the equivalent of going back to the 6th grade for the second time after doing really well the first time. What good is it to repeat that fight?