By Chris Williams: If trainer Freddie Roach had his way he’d match his fighter former WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao up against Miguel Cotto next so that it could potentially help Pacquiao in negotiating a fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. next year. Roach says Cotto has agreed to fight the Filipino star Pacquiao at a catchweight of 150 pounds.

Speaking with Examiner.comm writer Chris Robinson, Roach said “Cotto makes the most sense to me because he just went the distance with Mayweather. If we can knock him out again at 150, which he said yes to…our negotiating power with Mayweather would be a little stronger.”

The emphasis is on “Little” because a second win for Pacquiao over Cotto using yet another catchweight handicap would hardly be enough to gain much of anything in negotiating a fight with Mayweather. That fight would have to top Mayweather’s 1.5 million pay per view buys that he and Cotto brought in for their fight last May, and I don’t see that happening. If anything, the now flat-footed, plodding Pacquiao would do worse against Cotto in a rematch, unless Cotto were weight drained from the catchweight, and the PPV numbers would almost surely be lesser than the numbers that Mayweather-Cotto hauled in.

This in turn would make it impossible for Pacquiao’s promoter to ask for a 50-50 deal with Mayweather. Oh, I’m sure Arum and Pacquiao will still insist on a 50-50 deal with Mayweather even if Pacquiao struggles badly against Cotto and brings in lower PPV numbers, but Mayweather would laugh them out of the negotiation room if it ever got that far. It won’t. As soon as the 50-50 request is floated in the media, Mayweather will respond back by shooting that number down immediately, and it will likely never even get to the actual negotiations.

My guess is Arum will then have Pacquiao fight Juan Manuel Marquez and then followed by Tim Bradley, and then start the process again with Pacquiao fighting Cotto for a third time. It’ll likely be circular from here on with Pacquiao, taking no chances against non-proven PPV fighters and mainly taking on those three guys over and over.