By Allan Fox: Much has been said about WBA World middleweight champion Daniel “Miracle Man” Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs) being a huge step up in competition for the 34-year-old IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) for their fight on March 18, but is he really a step up or perhaps a step down?
Jacobs can definitely punch, and he has a knockout percentage of 88. However, Jacobs has not fought the best of opposition during his career, and you can’t really tell how good he is based on his many knockouts. All you can say is he beat Peter Quillin and lost to Dmitry Pirog.
Those were by far the best guys on the 29-year-old Jacobs’ nine-year pro resume.
Golovkin hasn’t faced a lot of high caliber fighters during his career, so Jacobs is at least a step in the right direction for him. Even so, Jacobs might not be any better than the biggest punchers Golovkin has faced in Kell Brook, Curtis Stevens, Kassim Ouma and David Lemieux.
In looking at how Jacobs has had problems with the punching power of Pirog, Ishe Smith and Sergio Mora in the past, it’s hard not to think that Lemieux and Stevens would knockout Jacobs if they landed cleanly with their power shots. The Kassim Ouma that fought Golovkin five years ago and gave him problems for 10 rounds would have been a nightmare for Jacobs.
That’s a fight that Jacobs would likely have lost. Ouma took monstrous shots from Golovkin for the entire fight, and he landed a lot of punches of his own. It’s hard to imagine Jacobs being able to take the kind of punishment that Golovkin did without getting knocked out.
I’d like to think that Jacobs is a step up for Golovkin in the talent department, but I don’t think he is. I see Jacobs as a fighter with a COMPLETELY padded resume of poor opponents. As I mentioned already, Jacobs has only fought two good fighters his entire career – Pirog and Quillin – and his record is 1-1 in those fights. There hasn’t been any improvement in Jacobs’ game in the last six years. He’s still the same fighter that Pirog knocked out in five rounds. The difference is that Jacobs has been fighting really poor opponents for six years to get him to where he is today.
All you need to do is look at Jacobs’ resume to know what I’m talking about. He’s padded his record for six years since his loss to Pirog. Beating the 33-year-old Quillin isn’t much of a win for Jacobs, because this is a fighter that had never beaten anyone good himself other than Hassan N’Dam. That’s the best win on Quillin’s resume, and he struggled badly against N’Dam. That was not an easy fight for Quillin. I think Quillin’s career slowed after his win over N’Dam. That was in 2012. By the time Jacobs got to Quillin in 2015, he was facing a guy that had done almost nothing since his win over N’Dam. Jacobs didn’t beat a prime Quillin. He fought a guy that had taken time off from boxing from 2014 to 2015 and fought to a controversial 12 round draw to Andy Lee in 2015, a fight in which a lot of fans thought Lee should have won.
I wish that Jacobs was a step up for Golovkin, but I don’t think that’s the case. My prediction for the Golovkin-Jacobs fight is a 1st or 2nd round knockout win for Golovkin. When that happens, the fans are going to wonder why the fight was so easy for GGG. The reason the fight will be easy for Golovkin is because Jacobs has no punch resistance whatsoever. He does not take punches well. When he gets hit, he gets hurt.
Jacobs win over Qullin was a case of Jacobs getting to Quillin before he got to him. It was one of those quick shootouts where one of these two flawed middleweights was going to get knocked out immediately, and it turned out to be Quillin. If the two fought each other 100 times, I think Quillin would KO Jacobs half the time. It would be a coin flip basically. Whoever landed first, they would win.
I would have liked to have seen Quillin fight someone like Lemieux or Curtis Stevens before he fought Golovkin to see if he could take their power, but I know already that he wouldn’t be able to. Once Lemieux and Stevens land a big shot on Jacobs’s chin, the fight would be all over. I think those two guys would have taken Jacobs’ power long enough for them to get to his chin and take him out.
I don’t think Jacobs is nearly as good as his inflated record would have you believe. He’s just a fighter with a lot of wins over guys that never did anything in the sport and never will. You’ve got to give Jacobs’ management credit for moving him to the position where he’s currently the WBA ‘regular’ middleweight champion and about to get a big payday against Golovkin, but I don’t think Jacobs is as good as his pumped up resume would you have believe.
The boxing fans that disagree with my opinion about Jacobs being an easy mark for Golovkin can tell me later that I was right after GGG destroys him in the first couple of rounds on March 18 in their fight on HBO PPV at Madison Square Garden in New York. I know what I see in Jacobs from having watched many of his fights during his career, and I see a guy with a weak chin that will go to pieces as soon as he’s hit hard for the first time in their fight.
If Jacobs can keep away from Golovkin for a round, then he’s going to get taken out in the 2nd round. It just comes down to how long it takes before Golovkin lands his first big power shot on Jacobs’ chin. The fight is going to be over at that point, and I think a lot of boxing fans are going to be angry, because they’ll have made the mistake of thinking that this was going to be a step up for Golovkin. It’s not a step up, believe me. Kell Brook would beat Jacobs in my opinion and beat him easily.