By Chris Williams: HBO analyst believes the perfect opponent for Manny Pacquiao (54-4-2, 38 KO’s) to fight is Brandon Rios (31-0-1, 23 KO’s) because of his face forward style of fighting and his lack of a reverse gear in his game. Merchant sees Rios being the ideal guy for Pacquiao to fight because he won’t have to come looking for him like he’s had to in recent fights against Shane Mosley, Tim Bradley and Juan Manuel Marquez.

Those three fighters have been the equivalent of throwing change-ups to a fastball hitter. Pacquiao has been off balance pretty much for the past year. His last fight against a slugger was against Antonio Margarito in 2010, but he wasn’t exactly young and didn’t have the game to stand and trade with Pacquiao due to his lack of hand speed in comparison to the much faster Pacquiao.

Merchant said to writer Chris Robinson at Examiner.com “Pacquiao needs a fighter who will come to him and fight him…I think he’d [Rios] be a great opponent for Pacquiao and vice versa.”

I agree with Merchant about this. However, it won’t be such a big deal if Pacquiao can’t beat Marquez on December 8th in their fourth fight. If Pacquiao loses that, I think it won’t be nearly as interesting Pacquiao fighting Rios because he’ll have lost his last two fights and boxing fans will see him as a shot fighter.

Rios is being hyped way too much for his win over Mike Alvarado last Saturday night. Fans are making more out of this win than they really should. Rios was having problems against Alvarado when he was boxing Rios from the outside. Had he not made the mistake of trying to trade with him on the inside, Alvarado might have been able to pull out a victory.

Rios is still tainted from his fight with Richard Abril earlier this year. I don’t care that the judges gave Rios the win, he really deserved to lose that fight and he looked really bad. By giving Rios a fight against Pacquiao, it’s almost as if Rios is being rewarded for failure because he’s still not done nearly enough to erase the stench from his controversial win over Abril. I know that won’t stop Arum from making a Rios-Pacquiao fight, because he would control both fighters in that match-up due to both of them being with his Top Rank stable.

Pacquiao has his own stench from his controversial decision win over Marquez last November, so maybe it’s fitting that Pacquiao and Rios end up fighting each other, because at least that way you can pretty much guarantee that one of them will end up losing the fight, something you might not be able to do if they were fighting someone else.