No, Garcia, at his peak and, we think, now fully focused like he should have always been in his career, appears to hold all the cards in this one; too many of them for Benn to have any real shot at beating him. For starters, Benn, a natural middleweight or super-middleweight, has hurt himself in making the 147-pound limit (and tomorrow’s official weigh-in could tell us plenty as far as how Saturday’s fight goes). Benn, “emaciated,” as one description has put it, could be severely weakened as well as compromised when he sets foot in the ring, due to having boiled down so dangerously low.

Also, Benn has never met anyone with the blend of speed and power that Garcia possesses. In a nutshell: it looks like a disaster coming for Benn. Maybe Benn – the son, as we know, of one of the most frighteningly brave and gutsy British warriors of them all – can prove us all wrong, and maybe he can fight the fire with fire, and show us that he did the right thing in dropping down to 147. Maybe. But it seems unlikely. Benn has shown his toughness in fights, but Garcia during his career has shown us class, accuracy of fist, and a spiteful element to his game. Might Garcia enjoy this fight, perhaps too much?

Garcia has predicted a KO win inside five.

Benn, having his first, if you want to call it, super-fight, will give it his all. Or at least he’ll try to. But Garcia, far more accustomed to the big-fight, Vegas atmosphere, looks set to sizzle, to dominate; to detonate. To detonate his famed left hook as he scores himself a highlight-reel KO victory.

Benn, 25-1(14) and coming off a good decision win over Regis Prograis, has never been stopped. He will be on Saturday.

Garcia, 25-2(20), the younger man by a year at age 28 and coming off that points win over Mario Barrios, in which he won the gold belt, will indeed shine like a star.

Garcia, with a flash, will land a chilling left hook, flush on the jaw. The bomb, a counter shot, will lay Benn out on the floor, possibly on his face, the fight over with. “King Ry” will celebrate his fifth-round KO prediction.

Benn will regroup and move up to either 160 or 168. Garcia? He may well engage in nothing but super-fights from Saturday on in. Maybe.

The WBO hurried Vargas up the ladder against opponents who barely belong on televised undercards. Walking through Mills, Agustin Quintana, and Jonathan Montrel is paid sparring. It does zero to prepare a kid for an elite technician coming off a one-sided dissection of Teofimo Lopez. The sanctioning body prints numbers next to names to collect sanctioning fees. It cannot gift a raw prospect the ring IQ required to survive an elite southpaw.

Vargas owns 64 professional rounds. He saw the tenth round exactly once. He never shared a ring with an ex-titleholder, let alone an elusive master of range. The stoppage over Mills gave Top Rank nice internet highlights. Vargas pressed forward against a guy willing to trade in a telephone booth. Mills cooperated completely. Shakur treats fighters like that as light cardio work. The champion controls distance with absolute cruelty.

He will dig body shots, angle out of corners, make Vargas reset every single rush. The moment frustration sets in, Vargas will begin lunging wildly. Shakur will step around those telegraphed swings, crack him with counters, and vanish before Vargas even finishes throwing.

Lopez learned that lesson the hard way. Lopez brought wins over Vasiliy Lomachenko, Josh Taylor, and Jamaine Ortiz into that ring, yet he still looked completely lost. If an experienced champion failed to win three rounds against Shakur, a prospect with zero marquee wins will drown inside six minutes.

Defensively, Vargas is an accident waiting to happen. He keeps his chin stuck in the air whenever he unloads combinations. When return fire comes his way, he commits the cardinal sin of pulling straight back with his left hand resting on his hip. Club fighters miss those openings. Shakur will pick him apart like an unpaid sparring partner.

Power means nothing when a fighter punches thin air. Shakur controls real estate so well that Vargas will spend 36 minutes swinging at ghosts while eating crisp left hands.

The Vargas family already paid this price once before. Fernando Vargas held a real belt at 154 pounds when promoters fed him to Felix Trinidad back in 2000. Fernando possessed true grit, yet he absorbed five knockdowns and sustained trauma that altered his entire career. Fernando took a beating from a puncher. Emiliano is being lined up to get systematically humiliated by a defensive wizard who will make him look amateurish.

Top Rank skipped entire tiers of matchmaking. If Bob Arum wants to find out what he truly has, he needs to stick Vargas in with Lindolfo Delgado. A solid technician like Delgado tests a prospect, exposes defensive holes over ten grueling rounds, and shows whether a kid possesses actual championship grit.

Getting outboxed by Delgado ends the hype train early, but feeding Vargas to Shakur ruins the fighter entirely.

Cashing out a young ticket seller for one mandatory payday is downright reckless. Vargas draws eyes. Top Rank has a marketable commodity they can build into a legitimate draw over three years. Throwing him into a mismatch strips the polish off the product overnight.

Weight drain makes matters worse. Vargas is a huge light welterweight who eventually grows into a full welterweight. Squeezing his body down to 140 pounds to chase an elusive target drains his legs before the opening bell rings.

Shakur will happily take the payday and collect an easy defense. The real blame falls on the handlers who confuse a manufactured ranking with genuine fighting ability. Vargas has plenty of raw talent. Serving him up to Shakur right now sacrifices a good kid just to give a champion an effortless night of work.

“You’re going to get this ass cooked, bro. You don’t even look on weight right now. Not even close. So, you’ve got a lot of work to do. We know what you’ve got to do after this,” said Ryan to First Take in his conversation with Benn. “Probably get in the sauna, probably do a lot of things. I’m chilling. So, I just don’t want to hear no excuses. I don’t want to hear, ‘Oh, you know, I was dehydrated. I was this. I was that.’ Please, just don’t give me no excuses.”

That was the most revealing part of their exchange. Ryan was relaxed enough to tell Benn that he was “chilling,” while painting a picture of his opponent sweating out the remaining pounds in a sauna.

There is obvious irony in Ryan lecturing another fighter about weight. He missed the 140-pound limit by more than three pounds against Devin Haney in 2024. Two years later, Ryan is the WBC welterweight champion and acting like the responsible adult monitoring Benn’s final cut. After taking the title from Mario Barrios in February, Ryan now makes his first defense. This is his chance to show that the discipline required from a champion has replaced the scale trouble and erratic behavior that previously followed him.

His April fight against Regis Prograis took place at a 150-pound catchweight, so Benn is not dropping directly from middleweight. Still, those three pounds matter when a fighter has spent years adding muscle for bouts at junior middleweight and middleweight.

Getting down to 150 once does not guarantee Benn can complete the final reduction without paying for it. The concern is not simply making the number. It is what Benn has left after he reaches it.

Applying pressure for 12 rounds requires active legs and plenty of energy. Benn’s punch resistance may also suffer if the final cut takes too much out of him. He cannot afford to slow down while charging into Ryan’s best weapon.

Those attacks often begin with Benn dipping forward as he tries to close distance with speed and aggression. If dehydration reduces his head movement, those entries may become easier to time. Ryan’s quick check left hook is built to punish an opponent rushing at him without moving his head sharply.

The repeated use of “I’m chilling” was deliberate. Ryan presented himself as calm and comfortable while Benn talked about graveyard shifts, pressure, and punching through his face. Benn wants intensity to look like commitment. To Ryan, it looks like desperation.

The goal is to make Benn angry enough to attack recklessly from the opening bell. Controlled pressure gives Benn a chance to crowd Ryan and work inside. Emotionally charged lunges give the champion the space to land his left hook.

Capturing the welterweight championship his father, Nigel Benn, never won brings additional personal motivation. That may sharpen Conor, but it may also tempt him to force the knockout he predicted. The weigh-in provides the first genuine test. If Benn arrives gaunt and exhausted, Ryan’s accusation will sound less like routine trash talk and more like an early diagnosis.

A clean performance on the scale would answer him. Anything else gives Ryan another psychological victory before either fighter throws a punch.