Pacquiao vs Vargas, ShoBox, more: Boxing TV schedule for November 4-5

Friday, November 4

Estrella TV, 10:00 pm ET, Tino Avila vs Jose Ramirez, Emilio Sanchez vs Diuhl Olguin. The other Jose Ramirez. Not the good one.

SHO, 10:35 pm ET, Taras Shelestyuk vs Jaime Herrera, Stivens Bujaj vs Constantin Bejenaru, Xolisani Ndongeni vs Juan Garcia Mendez, Vitor Jones Freitas vs Manuel Mendez. Pretty standard ShoBox lineup. Some good prospects facing some on-paper tests, and we’ll see how serious those tests are, but usually someone winds up impressing.

UniMás, 11:00 pm ET, Casey Ramos vs Andy Vences, Jesse Hart vs Andrew Hernandez, Alex Saucedo vs Tito Serrano. The main event here is a very good matchup of unbeaten prospects at 130 pounds, two guys Top Rank has hopes for — but since they’re fighting each other now, it does seem that either Top Rank’s matchmakers see a problem with one or both of them, or that Top Rank has decided to change its matchmaking strategy.

Saturday, November 5

PPV, 9:00 pm ET, Manny Pacquiao vs Jessie Vargas, Nonito Donaire vs Jessie Magdaleno, Oscar Valdez vs Hiroshige Osawa, Shiming Zou vs Prasitsak Papoem. Well, it’s a Pacquiao fight week, for whatever that’s worth now that he’s Senator Manny Pacquiao and he’s still a great but not otherworldly fighter. Pacquiao’s prime sort of spoiled us into not really caring about what he’s doing now, but this is a good matchup for him, about as good as he could do with this date. Vargas holds the WBO belt, and looked terrific against Sadam Ali earlier this year. The undercard is OK -- there are some names, and they are in fights. Valdez-Osawa is a lousy world title matchup, but Valdez won the belt with a lousy matchup, so whatever. Magdaleno is a sleeper against a past-prime Donaire, and Zou isn’t good enough to just assume he’ll win. BLH will have live coverage.