By Dan Ambrose: Light welterweight contender Josesito Lopez and junior middleweight contender Erislandy Lara have both reportedly signed with powerful adviser Al Haymon in hopes of it helping their career in terms of getting bigger fighters and bigger paydays.

Lara will likely be the one to really take advantage of this, because he’s got a lot of talent and can handle being matched against the very best fighters at junior middleweight.

With Lopez I’m not so sure this will pan out for him other than Haymon helping him get a big fight and nice payday at some point down the road. In looking at what Haymon has done for guys like Chris Arreola and Danny Garcia, for example, he’s put them in fights where they could succeed against guys that weren’t too much of a test. It’s obviously helped Arreola because his career has turned around and he’ll likely get a title shot in December or next year.

Lopez is someone that Haymon is going to need to try and match him with a big name as soon as possible because the boxing public could forget about him if there’s too big of a lull between his win over Victor Ortiz and his next big fight. It wouldn’t be ideal to take Lopez and put him in with six or seven soft touches right now because he’s not well known, and it probably wouldn’t interest boxing fans to see him facing unknowns one after another.

If Haymon is going to keep Lopez busy while Ortiz’s broken jaw heals up, he should try and get the biggest fight possible. It would be a pity to see Lopez being put on HBO big fight undercards against lesser guys. I don’t know that his popularity would be increased any, because he’s already been beaten four times and he was on his way to losing the Ortiz fight when Ortiz suddenly quit because of a broken jaw.