By Eric Thomas: Photo credit Tom Casino/Showtime – In the weigh-in video for Saturday’s championship fight between IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute (27-0, 22 KO’s) and challenger Brian Magee (34-3-1, 24 KO’s), one can’t help but notice that the 31-year-old Bute looks severely weight drained, like someone that struggled to squeeze down to the 168 pound weight limit for the division. Bute has been rumored to be melting down for the past two weeks, eating a lot of veggies, salads and fish to make weight.

This is kind of the standard thing for fighters making weight and usually there is no issues, but Bute looks really thin. He looks like someone who is stripping weight off for a body building contest rather than a fight. Luckily for Bute, he’s facing a guy that’s fought one true top tier opponent during his entire career in 35-year-old Magee. Bute should still win this fight even if he is weight drained. But it could be a little tougher fight than he expects it to be.

Magee, however, doesn’t have a lot of power and is a European level fighter who has been given a high ranking by the IBF. Bute should destroy Magee early in the fight before he starts to wear down. Magee would do well to try and survive into the later rounds so that he can expose Bute’s stamina. When you melt down to make weight like Bute appears to have done, it can leave you really weak and the longer the fight goes the worse for Bute it becomes.