Jesse Rodriguez vs Antonio Vargas

Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez’s fights are becoming one of the prime fixtures on the boxing calendar. You know what you’re going to get: skill, excitement, and more than likely a stoppage. The 26-year-old Texan doesn’t take prisoners. He doesn’t want fights to go the distance, but he does want fans to go home thrilled. The only other world champions who bring the same excitement are David Benavidez and Naoya Inoue, and let’s be honest, Inoue is looking like a future opponent for ‘Bam’ that we would pay anything to see.

And now that Bam is moving up to bantamweight, he draws ever closer to an Inoue fight. But of course, first he needs to take care of Antonio Vargas, a secondary WBA bantamweight championship titleholder with a good-looking record: 19 wins, 1 loss, and 1 draw. The draw came in his last fight in Japan against Diego Higa. All three judges scored the fight 113-113, but that is not the kind of performance you want to be giving before tackling ‘Bam.’ The lone loss on his resume came against Jose Maria Cardenas way back in 2019, via 1st-round knockout.

Vargas looks capable of giving Bam some rounds, but I suspect this fight will go pretty much the same way as all of 'Bam’s' recent outings. At some stage, he will be hit and hurt, dropped and stopped by a fighter that I think, by the end of the year, will be rated in the top three pound-for-pound fighters in the world