Showtime added a card to its schedule today for May 20th featuring WBC Featherweight titlist Gary Russell Jr (27-1, 16 KOs) and former two time super middleweight title challenger Andre Dirrell (25-2, 16 KOs) against Oscar Escandon (25-2, 17 KOs) and Jose Uzcategui (26-1, 22 KOs) respectively.
Both Dirrell and Russell Jr are very athletic, very talented fighters whose combination of inactivity and a lack of consistently facing elite opponents have made their careers quite maddening. Both of them only fought once in 2015, Russell in a garbage defense against dramatically overmatched Patrick Hyland and Dirrell in a barely better stay busy (but not really) fight against almost as overmatched Blake Caparello.
Escandon and Uzcategui both represent improvements in competition from 2015, but neither represent true threats on paper to legitimate top 10 talents. Escandon’s best win was a 2011 stoppage of then undefeated Jesus Cuellar, but recently he has lost a pair of split decisions when stepping up to world level for belts against Nehomar Cermeno and Moises Flores. Uzcagetui has been waiting to parlay his 2015 upset of Julian Jackson’s then unbeaten prospect of a son Julius into a bigger fight and now he has. His loss was a 2014 decision to Matt Korobov in an 0 must go fight.
