By Chris Williams: If former WBO middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (34-2, 27 KO’s) beats World Boxing Association junior middleweight champion Yuri Foreman (28-0, 8 KO’s) this Saturday night, it’s likely that the 29-year-old Cotto will be used as a substitute for Floyd Mayweather Jr. if he and Manny Pacquiao are unable to put a fight together for some reason. Cotto is a fine fighter, and had an excellent career, but I certainly don’t want to see him in a rematch with Pacquiao, not after seeing how badly Cotto was dominated in their fight last year.

Unfortunately, Cotto’s promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank plans on using Cotto, as well as Antonio Margarito, as a backup plan for Pacquiao to have someone to fight if the Mayweather bout doesn’t materialize. The first time around, I was mildly interested in seeing the Cotto-Pacquiao fight, but not now. I wasn’t all that interested in the fight because Cotto had been badly beaten by Margarito only a year earlier in an 11th round TKO loss in 2008, and Cotto hadn’t exactly shined in his 12 round decision victory over Joshua Clottey earlier last year.

And to top it off, when you factored in the catch weight that Cotto had to come in at for the Pacquiao fight; it spelled defeat even before he threw his first punch. Cotto, as I expected, wasn’t at all competitive with Pacquiao and lost pretty much every round until he was stopped in the 12th round by the Filipino fighter. Now Arum is putting Cotto in with WBA junior middleweight champion Foreman for Cotto to try and capture the WBA belt and have a flimsy reason for Pacquiao to waste his time fighting Cotto again.

Foreman has little power and hasn’t been in with a fighter like Cotto before, so there’s a chance that Cotto will be able to defeat Foreman and pick up his WBA crown. But I’m hoping that Cotto loses so that we can stop this pattern. If Arum wants to match Pacquiao up with yet another one of his Top Rank fighters, let him match him with Foreman or Margarito. I’m not at all interested in seeing either of those fights, but I imagine someone will.

But I do see both of those fighters as being more appealing fights than seeing Pacquiao thrash Cotto for a second time. I’m surprised that Arum is thinking of putting Cotto back in with Pacquiao at this early time, because the fight just happened in November and it wasn’t a competitive bout.

Arum obviously doesn’t have a lot of other options if his goal is to put Pacquiao with only Top Rank fighters, because he doesn’t have anyone for him to fight other than Margarito, who has no boxing license in the United States, and Cotto. That’s about it. And with the little time that Pacquiao has left, it’s now or never. This is why Cotto is being seen as a potential substitute for Mayweather if that fight doesn’t happen.