@Rumsfeld another quality video. That being said, I have a hard time seeing Vargas making it to your predicted round eleven. Vargas is a man with skills but nothing about him stands out, including his defense. He loses quite a few rounds against lesser fighters and that means he's getting hit. Having almost always fought at 118 Vargas is a legitimate bantamweight but I can not see him dealing with Rodriguez' speed, power or the variety of his arsenal. I see Bam needing no more than six rounds to take Vargas out.
I expect to see a statement performance by Bam which will lead to the eventual match up with Inoue. I'll be very surprised if Vargas makes it competitive, let alone last the distance.
easy win for bam. bam is a thoroughbred, while vargas is just a good workhorse. i think bam keeps him around longer than he needs to, just for the experience of operating at this new weight, then starts to press him around the 7th rd, leading to a stoppage around the 9th.
Good fight, but I can't help thinking in the back of my mind how much better a fight Tsutsumi would be than Vargas. I did learn from the video that Vargas is the WBA champion (I thought he was still champion in recess), but in the end, no one really cares about the WBA's belt shenanigans. People just want to see the best fights. Bam by KO in the 8th.
You could very well be right. It could wind up being a Tito-Joppy type of thing, but I have some reservations about how Bam will handle the new weight (where I'm actually split 3 ways, thinking he could perform worse than expected or as expected, but I also lend the possibility it COULD be a Tito-Joppy type of thing where he quickly proves his power carries up).
This is slightly off topic, but I remember seeing a post on here where someone asked, "How was Tito ever favored over Hopkins?" Hindsight is 20/20, but Tito was the favorite for a reason. His stellar performance against Joppy convinced a lot of people, including me, that he could carry his success up to middleweight. This was not a De La Hoya situation, where he looked shaky at middleweight, or a Brook situation, where he had not even fought at middleweight, let alone light-middleweight. Tito had already shown he could perform at the weight, which is why so many people gave him a real chance against Hopkins. I don't like people looking back at the past and acting "above it" without proper context.
I agree with what you're saying. Nobody beat Joppy up the way Tito did, and it took years before he was stopped again. And you are correct, it was nothing like the DLH situation where a lot of observers (if not most) believed Sturm deserved the nod. And yet we STILL see it all the time - "Tito was just a blown up welterweight". Not only does it ignore what he did against Joppy, it also ignores his incredible (albeit brief) run at 154. Then there is the fact that Tito was a powerhouse champion at welterweight.
You also forgot to mention the narrative that, because De La Hoya should have won againist Tito, Tito somehow wasn't a true p4p talent. That logic never made any sense to me. Speaking of which, a lot of that same reasoning now affects De La Hoya's legacy. People act as if his dominance at 130–140 pounds never existed. In my opinion, his run there was comparable to Roy Jones at 160–168 or Inoue at 118 and below. Instead, many fans only look at De La Hoya's career from 147–160 pounds, disregard his great wins, and focus almost exclusively on the so-called "robberies," many of which were close fights that realistically could have gone either way.
I understand what you’re saying about Bam handling the weight. That certainly could be an issue but I think the problem is that Bam is a few levels above Vargas and I just don’t think Vargas has what it takes to use his weight advantage to good effect. In any event, with Naoya Inoue no longer the beast he was at the lighter weights I think that Rodriguez is as close as we have to a must see fighter. I’m really looking forward to the bout.
