By Jason Kim: Since taking beatings from both Antonio Margarito and Manny Pacquiao, Miguel Cotto isn’t being put in with dangerous fighters all of a sudden, and you have to wonder if Cotto is ducking the better fighters in boxing to try and get a little more mileage out of his career. Cotto faced the feather-fisted WBA junior middleweight paper champion Yuri Foreman in his last fight in June of 2010. Foreman may be a decent fighter but he’s far from being in the class of Sergio Martinez, a fighter that has been trying to get a fight with Cotto for ages without any luck.

And now that Cotto has beaten Foreman, which doesn’t say much, Cotto is facing another weak opponent in the 37-old Ricardo Mayorga, who is well past his prime. It’s hard to argue that Mayorga is the best fighter that Cotto can have picked when Mayorga isn’t even ranked in the top 20 in the junior middleweight division. This is kind of sad how Cotto is now being steered against weaker fighters instead of ones that are more competitive.

After Cotto gets through with the Mayorga fight, his promoter Bob Arum will be putting him in with Antonio Margarito next instead of someone that is actually winning and looking good. Margarito has looked shot since his loss to Shane Mosley in 2009, and he didn’t look any better in his two fights since then against Roberto Garcia and Pacquiao. For fans that were once impressed with Cotto, it’s got to be sad how he’s deteriorated to the point where he’s being put in with paper champions like Foreman and washed up ones like Mayorga instead of relevant fighters. It’s like once great signing act deciding in the mid point of their careers to become a lounge singer in Las Vegas.