By Scott Gilfoid: In a poll conducted by RingTV, WBC lightweight champion Adrien Broner (25-0, 21 KO’s) came out as an overwhelming favorite to defeat his challenger from Wales Gavin Rees (37-1-1, 18 KO’s) on Saturday night in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Close to 4,000 fans participated in the poll. Not only is Broner a huge favorite to win the fight, he’s also overwhelmingly being picked to win by a KO.
81.3 percent of the fans polled selected Broner to win the fight, and of that total, 70.6 percent see Broner stopping Rees at some point in the fight. Surprisingly 16.9% of the fans see Rees beating Broner with 12.6% of those fans seeing Rees winning by a KO.
It’s hard to imagine what the fans are thinking of when they decided to pick Rees as the winner, as he looks SO far out of his league in this fight that it’s not even funny. The skill and talent level between Rees and Broner is big enough to drive a truck through it.
Rees looks like a fine little domestic level lightweight, whereas Broner looks to be the best at the world level. You see the difference? But it’s not surprising that some fans are picking Rees because he seems so badly out of his class in this fight.
Rees has mentioned wanting to try two strategies to beat Broner on Saturday night. His first plan is to throw a lot of punches to try and “outwork” Broner somehow. The second plan is for Rees to use a lot of movement to keep from being a stationary target/punching bag for him.
I don’t expect Rees to try very hard at out-working Broner before giving up on that plan. If anything, we might see Rees only try that plan for all of one round, if that, and then fall back onto plan B and start running for survival.
You don’t like to see this kind of thing for a challenger because this is Rees’ big chance, and it could be his last title shot of his career. You hate to see Rees just fight to survive and spoil, but I guess he might not want to go out on his shield the way some fighters do.
Broner’s promoter Eddie Hearn is under the impression that Rees will fight valiantly to win over HBO to where they’ll want to put Rees on their network in the future. That obviously isn’t going to happen if Rees puts on his track shoes after one round and runs for the next 11 rounds just to keep from getting knocked out.
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