With this fight being elevated to the main event on ESPN+ card on Saturday night after the injury suffered by Carl Frampton, Philly native and Super-Featherweight contender 🇺🇸Jason Sosa (23-3-4, 16KO) got in the ring to square off against 🇺🇸Haskell Rydell Rhodes (27-4-1, 13KO) to try and impress the boxing contingent and put on a show for his home crowd, and he was successful in doing both.

Sosa looked well trained for this fight, and made it clear that he wanted to get inside and hammer the body, and counterpunch upstairs whenever Rhodes sense of distance was off, which was often. It was tough to figure out what Rhodes ultimately wanted to do from a game planning perspective, but he spent the majority of the night wrestling inside with Sosa, but not following up with any work as he wouldn’t let his hands go while wrestling to get into position. Every once in a while he could circle outside and use his legs, which he should’ve done from the start, but even in doing that, he didn’t utilize his jab at all, and Sosa made him slowly pay for it with quality work in mid distance, and inside.

In the 5th round, Sosa put Rhodes down twice, the first from a big sweeping lead left hook to the chin that had Rhodes disoriented for the rest of the round. Sosa displayed a high level of intelligence by carefully placing his shots, meeting Haskell with shots toward whatever side he was leaning to, cutting off his escape routes, and the amount of punishment accumulated. Sosa later in the round landed a well placed lead right hand to put him down once again. Rhodes was able to get up and survived the round, but the sense you got was that it was only a matter of time up to this point. Sosa planted more seeds in the 6th round, and in the 7th, he put Haskell down for a 3rd time from a ‘left 45 punch’ (half hook, half uppercut) while Rhodes leaned forward and out to his left. He beat the count, but the wear and tear on the body eventually prompted his trainer Danny Garcia to get up on the ring-apron to signal the stoppage of the fight, securing the TKO victory for Sosa in front of his home contingent.