Cotto vs. Margarito 2: Why Miguel Cotto's TKO Victory Proved Nothing

Miguel Cotto got the revenge on Antonio Margarito he's been seeking for three years with a 10th-round TKO victory on Saturday night. It was a nice moment for the 31-year-old WBA light middleweight champion, but in the end, it didn't mean a thing. 

It is no secret Margarito is not the same fighter he used to be.

He is an old 33, slower than he used to be, and, oh yeah, he's had problems seeing out of his right eye thanks to the beating Manny Pacquiao gave him last year. 

Congratulations, Cotto. You beat a fighter who is past his prime and had to hope beyond hope that the New York State Athletic Commission would license him just to make the fight happen. 

All the talk about Margarito not being able to load up his gloves for this fight is just silly. As Michael Woods of ESPN.com wrote, it is entirely possible that Margarito just isn't the same fighter he used to be.

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Does this mean necessarily that Margarito was cheating the first fight? No; he's had three eye surgeries in six months. Manny Pacquiao hammered him brutally at the end of 2010. He may have just lost a step. But suspicion will linger, and even intensify because he looked less effective this time than he did in 2008. 

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We don't know any more about Cotto today than we did yesterday. He is still one of the best boxers in the world today, but he is not in the Pacquiao/Floyd Mayweather territory. 

There should be no desire to see a second Cotto-Pacquiao fight after the way their first fight ended, so all that we know is that in 2011, Cotto is a better fighter than Margarito. 

If I were to have taken a straw poll before Saturday's fight, I would be willing to bet that 100 percent of all people responding would have said that anyway. 

Cotto can rest easy knowing that he avenged the first loss of his storied career, but there is nothing more he gained from this fight. OK, he did make a lot of money for doing it too. 

It was a great spectacle for the sport of boxing, Cotto and the city of New York, which really got behind him and this fight, but now that it is over, what do we really know now that we didn't already?