By Michael Collins: Eddie Hearn, the promoter for IBF super middleweight champion Carl Froch, is hoping the International Boxing Federation will allow Froch to temporarily bypass his IBF mandatory challenger Adonis Stevenson in order to try and get a rematch with former IBF champ Lucian Bute. However, it’s unclear whether the IBF will allow Froch to skip the Stevenson bout and it’s also unknown if Bute even wants the Froch rematch right now.
Froch doubts that he does and it wouldn’t be that surprising if Bute does choose not to take the rematch right now. After all, Bute was badly knocked out by Froch last May, and in his last fight Bute looked less than impressive against Denis Grachev.
It could be that Bute doesn’t want the Froch fight now so that he can get a couple of confidence building bouts under him before fighting Froch in 2014. But the bad news is if Bute chooses to skip the Froch rematch it’ll put Froch in the position of having to take the dangerous mandatory challenger Adonis Stevenson. This could potentially be a really tough fight for Froch because Stevenson isn’t like Yusaf Mack in that he won’t fold up in three rounds.
Stevenson has much better power than Mack and he’s a lot faster. He’s a much better overall fighter, and he could pull off an upset if he can land his big power shots. Hearn wants to go around this fight so that Froch can take on his lucrative rematches against Bute, Mikkel Kessler and Andre Ward. But in order to do that Froch will either have to vacate his IBF title or go ahead fight Stevenson to get it out of the way. You have to look at it this way. If Froch can’t beat Stevenson then he has no business trying to get rematches against Kessler and Ward, because those guys are arguably much better than Stevenson.