By Jason Kim: After nine long years of being groomed and cultivated against largely B and C level opposition, WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (45-0-1, 31 KO’s) will take his highly inflated resume into his fight against Andy Lee (28-1, 20 KO’s) at the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas.

This is truly a pick em fight, because both guys have positives that are balanced out by many negatives.

Lee is definitely the best fighter that Chavez Jr. has ever faced, and you have to figure that he’s been scouted out well ahead of this fight and deemed not a threat to Chavez Jr. They wouldn’t have made this fight if Lee was considered a truly dangerous opponent. However, Chavez Jr. is far from a great fighter and even if Lee does have a lot of flaws, he’s still got a great chance of winning this fight as long as it doesn’t go to the score cards.

If the fight goes the distance you have to figure that Chavez Jr., the home fighter, will win the fight. This is Texas and he’s the star in this fight. Home fighters that are considered stars rarely lose by decisions unless they take a real beating. Lee definitely has the power to get the job done in this fight as long as he’s able to keep upright for 12 rounds and not get his bell rung more than once.

Lee has stand up European style of fighting that makes it easy to hit him with head shots. When he does get hit, his head often whip lashes for some reason. It could be because he has a slender neck or more likely because he doesn’t tuck his head down like most fighters do. He prefers to stand straight up and that causes problems when he gets hit solidly.

A loss for Chavez Jr. would be a huge, because it could hurt him in the money department. He’s been making good money despite the fact that he’s not faced the real best fighters at middleweight. A loss here could cause his promoter Arum to put Chavez Jr. back on the B and C regimen for another two or three years to make sure he doesn’t get beaten again and also to make sure the money keeps rolling in. Chavez Jr. makes good money no matter who he fights. They can drag in almost anyone and he’ll do well as long as he’s getting a crowd of 20,000 and his fights are shown on HBO. I think HBO will continue to televise Chavez Jr’s fights even if he does get knocked out tonight by Lee, but it will put them in a spot where they might look bad if all Chavez Jr. does is fight C level opposition for the next year or two after this fight.