By Dave Lahr: Photo credit Tom Casino/Showtime – It doesn’t take a sharp eye to see that IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute (27-0, 22 KO’s) looked incredibly emaciated and dried out at Friday’s weigh-in for his fight against Irish challenger Brian Magee (34-3-1, 24 KO’s) on Saturday at the Bell Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Bute must walk around at between 190 to 200 lbs between fights because he looks as if he took off an enormous amount of weight to melt down to the 168 pound weight limit for the super middleweight bout.

Bute doesn’t just look like someone that took off a bunch of water weight; he looks like someone that just took too much weight off period for this fight. Whether that was because Bute started at too high a weight to begin with at the start of his training camp or whether he just freaked out and over-trained isn’t known. But what is hard to miss is how painfully thin Bute looks for this fight. I’ve seen Bute’s last 10 bouts and he’s never ever looked anything like this. Maybe Bute put on a little too much weight and had to melt down drastically to get down to the 168 limit. For boxing fans that don’t understand the problems with looking emaciated this close to an important fight, I’ll spell it out to you.

If you drain yourself down, take off too much important weight to get down to whatever weight limit that you’re trying to make, oftentimes the weight that is sacrificed is lean muscle tissue. If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to be on diet, you’ll note that you probably felt weak and not nearly as strong as you were before you started to diet down. Well, try and imagine having to fight under those same conditions, only worse because if you have to really melt down hard in the last two weeks prior to a fight, you’re going to be even weaker. Looking at Bute’s pictures and the video of the weight-in on Friday, I’d say that Bute took off way too much weight in melting down and looks like a bodybuilder who cut down weight in the last few days for a contest, not a fight.

This could hurt Bute badly in robbing him of badly needed strength for the Magee bout. I think Magee looks great and doesn’t look at all like he had problems making the 168 pound limit. If he can stick around for awhile in this fight, get to the 8th round at least, he has a great chance to knock Bute out. All he has to do is stick around and start landing head shots when Bute tires out in the later part of the fight and then take him out with a flurry of shots.