Is Daniel Jacobs Overrated?

By Jason Kim: Since turning professional in 2007, middleweight Daniel Jacobs (13-0, 12 KOs) has quickly racked up 13 wins over almost ridiculously soft opposition, the kind that many good fighters would likely beat almost as easily as Jacobs has done. And while Jacobs has done what he’s had to do to get the wins, I’m not quite ready to drink the Kool Aid just yet and proclaim him as a future champion like so many others have already done. I don’t know if it’s me or what, but the he looks slow, very hittable, slightly over-muscled, short and not good at throwing combinations.

I see him as a weaker version of Jeff Lacy, who looked much better at the same point in his career than Jacobs has looked. At the same point in his career, Lacy was also 13-0, with 11 knockouts instead of 12 like Jacobs, but I’d be willing to bet that Lacy’s competition was slightly better.

Beyond records, Jacobs just doesn’t look like he as the skills to be a future champion in the middleweight or super middleweight division. That’s not to say that he couldn’t develop some skills or become more of a threat if he were to drop down in weight to the light middleweight division, but for middleweight, he doesn’t seem to have what it takes from what I’ve seen of him.

In his toughest fight yet, against Emmanuel Gonzalez in September, Jacobs dropped Gonzalez in the 2nd round, but then struggled for the rest of the way, hitting him a lot but getting hit often in return. I wasn’t so concerned about his leaky defense, which looked terrible, because that’s something he can possibly fix in time.

What he probably won’t be able to fix is his slow hand speed, lack of height and poor fighting ability at a distance. Listed at 6’1”, Jacobs looks shorter than that, and my guess is he may be anywhere from 5’9’ to 6’, although to me he doesn’t look close to six-feet. For the remainder of his bout with Gonzalez, Jacobs traded shots with him, and looked less than impressive.

I was sadly disappointed, because I had seen a few of his other fights and he’d knocked out his opponents really quickly and looked awesome. However, in stopping them so quickly, I wasn’t able to get a real measure of how good Jacobs really is, because there wasn’t enough time to see his quality in one round, which is about the length of time that most of his opponents have lasted with him.

To date, Jacobs has knocked out eight of his thirteen opponents in the first round. It’s good to win fights as fast as possible, but it tends to lose its value when the opponents are as poor as the ones that Jacobs has faced up to this point in his earlier career.

In his last fight, Jacobs stopped Victor Lares in the 2nd round in December. In making it to the second round, Lares was a rare opponent that made it this far against Jacobs. But in winning, I saw the same problems as I did in Jacobs win over Gonzalez, namely a lack of hand speed, poor combinations and little movement.

I honestly think that Lacy looked a lot better than Jacobs does now when he was at the same stage in his career. Lacy seemed like a much harder puncher, exploding huge shots with each hand and showing one-punch knockout ability.

Jacobs doesn’t seem to punch nearly as hard, needing a number of hard shots to equal the same thing that Lacy would accomplish with one punch. I give him this – Jacobs is a good body puncher and can win his fights with big body shots. Still, that’s probably not going to be good enough when he steps up at some point against better fighters in the middleweight division.

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