By Dan Ambrose: A drained looking Brandon Rios (33-2-1, 24 KOs) weighed in at 147.2lbs at today’s weigh-in for his title shot against WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (32-1-1, 12 KOs) on Saturday night at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Rios, 29, now has exactly one hour to lose the .2lbs for him to be able to get a shot at Bradley’s WBO 147lb title.
For his part, Bradley weighed in at 146lbs and looked totally cut up and in excellent shape. Rios has looked drained all week long and he clearly has had a tough time making the 147lb limit for the fight. According to Dan Rafael, Rios’ promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank is “furious” about Rios not making weight for the fight.
In theory, it shouldn’t take too much out of Rios having to take off .2lbs in an hour’s time. However, as drained as Rios looks, he appears to have been battling hard for the past week to drain down to the 147lb limit. My guess is he’s going to be pretty worn out by the time he does take off the remaining .2lbs to make the weight. I saw this coming yesterday though, because Rios still looked far too big to make weight. There were a lot of media members who knew that Rios wasn’t going to hit the weight because he was still too heavy looking at the time.
What this means for Rios is that he’s going to need to really go after Bradley in the early rounds on Saturday night for him to have a chance of winning the fight, because he’s probably not going to have a lot of energy in the 2nd half of the fight if he fails to get him. Bradley has never been knocked out before, so Rios obviously has his work cut out for him.
Rios seems to be having problems making weight for the 147lb division. He can’t fight at 154lb because the talented fighters like Jermall Charlo, Erislandy Lara and Demetrius Andrade would totally school him in that weight class. But if Rios can’t make weight at 154, then it might be in Arum’s best interest to cut his losses and let him go if/when he loses on Saturday night. Arum says he wants the loser of Saturday’s fight to fight Top Rank fighter Jessie Vargas next, but I’m not sure how much money HBO would be willing to pay for a fight like that with Vargas coming off of a loss and the Bradley-Rios loser coming off of a loss. I doubt that Bradley would agree to a second fight against Vargas, and I doubt that HBO would bless an awful fight like that. Bradley already beat Vargas last June, so who would want to see a second fight between them?
In other weights on the card, WBO featherweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko (4-1, 2 KOs) weighed in at 125.6 pounds. His over-matched opponent Romulo Koasicha (25-4, 15 KOs) weighed in at 125.6lbs. This is a pretty simple mismatch. It’s not a great fight, and it’s arguably a step down from Lomachenko’s last to mismatches against Gamalier Rodriguez and Chonlatarn Piriyapinyo.
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