HBO’s viewership down for Bradley-Rios

The Bradley-Rios fight had a peak of 1.03 million viewers.

Top Rank’s welterweight contender, Jessie Vargas (26-1, 9ko), is still pushing for a rematch with WBO champion and promotional stablemate, Tim Bradley, insisting his former foe isn’t prepared to do so as he knows he’d end up getting knocked out!

In another report by RingTV, Rios reiterated his plans to hang up his gloves for good during the post-fight press conference.

Rios made the announcement of his retirement during his post-fight interview with HBO Boxing analyst Max Kellerman.

Rios has had a total of 37 fights (33-3-1, 24 KO) as a professional boxer. But overall, Bradley looked pretty much the same as he’s been in the past.

Bradley utilized his footwork more to create angles and avoid languishing on the inside, a locale that made him more exciting but also more vulnerable in recent fights.

We heard a lot afterwards how Atlas changed Bradley’s fighting style, but that’s a bunch of baloney.

Rios and Bradley’s fight for the WBO Welterweight title on Saturday stopped at round nine.

HBO’s opening bout, which featherweight titlist Vasyl Lomachenko won by one-sided 10th-round knockout of Romulo Koasicha, averaged 585,000 viewers and peaked at 657,000. That fight averaged 966,000 viewers on HBO. So what does that tell you? Shortly after the fight, the 29-year-old boxing champ announced that he would retire from the sport, a decision that was quickly supported and applauded by his promoter Bob Arum. “My body wasn’t doing the things I wanted it too”. He was behind on the scorecards and on his way to losing the 10 round scheduled fight.

Yet, many believe that Rios seemed to be in bad shape during his last fight.

During the Rios vs. Bradley fight last Saturday night was a college football game between Alabama and LSU, which brought in monster ratings of 11.1 million viewers. However, I doubt that was the reason why boxing fans chose not to bother watching the Bradley-Rios fight.

When Bradley ended a decade-plus-long relationship with Joel Diaz, under acrimonious circumstances with accusations and bad vibes flowing in both directions, and replaced him with veteran firebrand Teddy Atlas, there was plenty of head-scratching to go around.