Two dates discussed for Froch-Abraham: Nov. 27 and Dec. 18

Gareth Davies of the Telegraph reports that two dates are up in the air for a rescheduled fight between Carl Froch and Arthur Abraham. Those dates are November 27 and December 18, and both have issues with American TV.

HBO will be running a big fight between Juan Manuel Marquez and Michael Katsidis on November 27, something Showtime would obviously prefer to not go up against. The fix could be just biting the bullet and airing the fight live in the afternoon instead of on tape delay that night. I know it's not ideal, but neither is losing a lot of your potential audience to the HBO card, which could happen.

The other date, December 18, is booked for the Jean Pascal-Bernard Hopkins fight in Quebec ... which is being carried by Showtime PPV. Monte Carlo is the said to be the location for Froch-Abraham. You can't really consider putting a fight on Showtime at 9pm and a Showtime PPV fight at 9pm, too. That would be dumb, for lack of a better word. Integrating a tape delayed fight between Froch and Abraham into the PPV would be unwise, since then you have to figure out how to split all the PPV revenue, as obviously Froch and Abraham would want their share, and I think it would damage Showtime's reputation to chuck that fight onto a PPV broadcast when the entire tournament has been included in your Showtime subscription already. There's almost no way they could be considering that idea, so I just thought I'd throw it out there and then take my own dump on it before anyone thought it was a real possibility.

Of the two dates, Nov. 27 makes much more sense. Honestly, I'll find a live feed of the fight from overseas sometime in the afternoon, but a lot of people don't do that, so they'll just have to take the hit of going against a tremendous fight on HBO if that's the date they choose. The only possibly open date in November or December is December 4, which might be a Miguel Cotto-Kermit Cintron fight on HBO or PPV. Probably the weakest fight overall to go against is, in all honesty, HBO's November 20 rematch between Sergio Martinez and Paul Williams. For one thing, they could air new boxing up against HBO's replay of Pacquiao-Margarito, which will precede the Martinez-Williams fight. The replays usually do good ratings, but there's just no good way out here, and they could try marketing new instead of a fight you saw the week before.

The good news is they have a choice on start time for the fight since it'll be on tape delay. So they can avoid going truly head-to-head with any of the HBO main events, even if they have to start at 8pm EDT or something.