By Dan Ambrose: In a poll conducted by RingTV, boxing fans preferred by a wide margin that WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia fight #1 Brandon Rios or #2 Lucas Matthysse for Garcia’s next fight in February or March of next year. Boxing fans don’t appear to be all that interested in seeing Garcia fight Zab Judah, who has already been mentioned by Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer as possibly the next guy that Garcia fights.

Below are the results of the poll from 3,855 fans:

45.7% – Brandon Rios
27.3% – Lucas Matthysse
12.1% – Juan Manuel Marquez
4.5% – Zab Judah
4.2% – Lamont Peterson
3.2% – Josesito Lopez
1.9% – Mike Alvarado
1% – Pablo Cesar Cano

Unfortunately, you can immediately rule out a fight between Rios facing Danny Garcia because Rios fights for Top Rank and Garcia fights for Golden Boy Promotions, and those two companies very rarely stage fights between each other. So, Rios is out, perhaps permanently until one of the two fighters leave their promotional companies and join up with each other on the same side.

Matthysse is an easy fight to be made, but unfortunately if Schaefer is already talking about matching Judah up against Garcia then that’s likely what will happen even though the boxing fans have spoken. The problem with this poll is that it was likely done by hardcore boxing fans and not the casual variety who have no clue who Matthysse is.

Schaefer and Golden Boy are likely counting on the casual fans knowing a little bit more about Judah than they do Matthysse. Fans who have been occasionally following boxing for the past 10 years will have possibly seen Judah fight the likes of Floyd Mayweather Jr., Kostya Tszyu, Miguel Cotto or Cory Spinks at some point during the last decade.

Casual boxing fans probably haven’t seen any fights of Matthysse, which makes him a poor choice for Garcia. But there’s also the potential idea that Golden Boy wants to protect their investment in Garcia by keeping him away from fighters that could end his reign before it’s really gotten started. Mattysse is good enough to unseat Garcia and ruin Golden Boy’s best laid plans.