Alvarado-Provodnikov fight draws 1.2 million views on HBO

By Boxing News - 10/23/2013 - Comments

provodnikov999By Dan Ambrose: Last Saturday night’s bout bout between former WBO light welterweight champion Mike Alvarado (34-2, 23 KO’s) and Ruslan Provodnikov (23-2, 16 KO’s) drew an impressive 1.2 million viewers on HBO. The totals equals the amount of viewers that tuned in to watch Alvarado’s previous fight against Brandon Rios last March on HBO.

What this means is that there’s a good possibility that HBO will be televising an Alvarado-Provodnikov rematch in the future or they’ll at least continue to televise Alvarado’s fights despite him quitting after the 10th round.

There’s no question that HBO will continue to show Provodnikov’s fights because he’s really impressed the network with his performances in the Tim Bradley and now the Alvarado fight. What’s not known is if HBO will continue to show Alvarado’s fights if he’s not paired with Provodnikov or someone like Rios, Manny Pacquiao or Juan Manuel Marquez.

HBO needs guys like Provodnikov to help pump up their ratings because a lot of the good fighters are now being shown on Showtime rather than HBO now. Floyd Mayweather Jr., Danny Garcia, Adrien Broner, Marcos Maidana, and Lucas Matthysse all have their fights on Showtime and they’ve really helped out the network with their exciting fights. HBO has fighters like Pacquiao, Provodnikov, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., Sergio Martinez, Rios, Alvarado, Bradley, Miguel Cotto. In other words, Top Rank fighters. However, Pacquiao, Cotto and Sergio Martinez are getting kind of long in the tooth and it’s difficult to imagine any of them still fighting at a high level in three years from now, if they’re fighting at all.

HBO will need to find new blood to beef up their Boxing telecasts unless they’re cut back. It might help if HBO starts showing more of Golden Boy’s fighters because they seem to have a lot of young fighters with a lot of talent. You don’t want HBO to end up with inferior quality fights involving a small stable of house fighters that they show over and over again.

Cotto’s recent fight against Delvin Rodriguez brought in 1.55 million views, but that was largely due to Cotto’s popularity rather than the Cotto-Rodriguez fight being seen as an appealing one. It wasn’t. The fight was a terrible mismatch on paper and a mismatch in reality. But Cotto is so well known among casual boxing fans that it doesn’t matter who he fights. He still draws good ratings even when he’s fighting lesser quality opposition. HBO’s problem is Cotto’s advancing age. He’s not going to be able to keep fighting for too much longer against the best fighters without him taking more losses.

Cotto looks great against an average fighter like Rodriguez, but if you put him in with Austin Trout or Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, you’re going to see Cotto get clowned or destroyed by them. I don’t think Cotto or HBO will be satisfied by facing Delvin Rodriguez type opposition indefinitely, so that means he’s going to have to step it up once again to the top level fighters and when that happens, we’re probably going to see him getting beaten repeatedly. HBO won’t be able to count on Cotto for long, and unless Top Rank expands their stable by adding good fighters that the boxing public cares about then HBO could end up getting beaten by Showtime in the ratings war in he future.