By Dan Ambrose: After losing by a 12 round unanimous decision to 24-year-old Danny Garcia (23-0, 14 KO’s) last Saturday night, 35-year-old Erik Morales (52-8, 36 KO’s) was second guessing his fight strategy in the losing effort, wondering if the outcome would have been somehow different had he let his hands go a little more to try and win rounds.

Morales said “I should have thrown more punches. I probably could have done more. I thought I was capable of doing more.”

Perhaps the real truth here is no matter what Morales did, Garcia would have come up with something to nullify it. Had Morales thrown more punches, Garcia would have likely upped his work rate to the point where he was still throwing more punches than Morales. Physically speaking, Morales wasn’t going to throw more shots than Garcia because he’s not that kind of fighter. It’s possible that Morales would have helped himself by throwing more shots, but it’s equally possible that he would have either run out of gas or succumbed to Garcia’s response to his greater output by upping his own output to a higher level.

This was always going to be a tough fight for Morales because Garcia is one of the best fighters in the light welterweight division now. It’s a credit to Morales that he took the fight rather than dodging it, because a lot of champions likely would have stepped around Garcia to take an easier option. There’s something in Morales that kept him from doing the easy thing that a lot of champions would do. He has too much pride to bypass a dangerous fighter like Garcia and that led directly to him taking the fight losing.

Garcia is fighter that Morales would have likely beaten years ago, but not now. We saw that Morales didn’t have the fire power to compete with Garcia. He’s just one of handful of guys at 140 that would likely beat Morales at this point in his career.