By Dan Ambrose: It’s going to be tough for WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto to come up with a good plan that he can utilize to bring undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. to his knees on May 5th in their huge HBO televised pay-per-view bout at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Cotto has always been a really basic fighter with only a couple of ideas that he uses in his fights to get wins.

However, against Mayweather, Cotto will need multiple plans and will have to be able to shift from one to another during the course of rounds rather than having his trainer tell him what to do in between rounds.

Cotto can’t afford to have his trainer tell him what time it is and hold his hand when he starts getting pounded by Floyd. If Cotto can’t think for himself and come up with a plan B, C, D and E during the rounds, he’s going to probably get drilled into the canvas like former WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz was in his recent 4th round TKO loss to Mayweather.

Can Cotto learn a bunch of different things he can use to beat Mayweather? Maybe. I think he can learn them, but I doubt Cotto will be able to apply the right strategy correctly. He’ll likely be like someone that learned a bunch of different math formulas during an all night cram session, but won’t know which problems he’s supposed to use the different formulas on. When you’ve been a basic fighter like Cotto all your career, it’s difficult to learn a lot new strategies that you can use to win. Cotto will probably come out and do what he always does. He either is going forward with his foot on the pedal or in reverse mode using lateral movement. Those are basically all Cotto has and he’s far too predictable for a skilled fighter like Mayweather.