By Scott Gilfoid: WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham (35-3, 27 KO’s) will be defending his title for the first time on December 15th against middleweight fringe contender Mehdi Bouadla (26-4, 11 KO’s) in a HUGE mismatch in Nuremberg, Bayem, Germany. How the World Boxing Organization could sanction a fight like this is what I want to know.

Bouadla, 30, isn’t even ranked in the super middleweight division in the top 15. He is ranked #13 by the WBA at middleweight, but you have to think that he should at least have a ranking in the super middleweight division. Unfortunately, match-ups like these are becoming the norm nowadays in boxing with Golden Boy Promotions matching up their fighters Saul Alvarez and Paulie Malignaggi with guys from divisions below them.

I hope the WBO takes a stand and says not, because Bouadla isn’t even ranked in the top 15 by the WBO at middleweight. When you do see a promoter combing the light weights to match his bigger champion against for an easy win, they usually stick with contenders from the same sanctioning body as the champion but in a division or two below. But in this case, Bouadla doesn’t have a ranking in the top 15 by the WBO at middleweight. Sure, he’s ranked #13 by the WBA at 160, but no ranking by the WBO at 160.

Okay, so this is a title milking fight for Abraham, and somehow I knew this was going to happen once Abraham got the title. Why? Because if you look at the four years that Abraham held the IBF middleweight title before moving up to super middleweight, Abraham faced a ton of weak opponents. Of the years Abraham was the IBF 160 pound champion the best opponent he faced during all that time was Edison Miranda. That’s pretty sad if you ask me. So now that Abraham is the 168 pound WBO champ, it looks like history is repeating itself.

There’s not much to say about Bouadla. He comes from France and has a record of mostly obscure, weaker opposition where he got pretty much all of his wins. He did step up a handful of times during his 9-year career, losing Mikkel Kessler, Gennady Golovkin, and Affif Belhachemi. He’s slow, short, and doesn’t have much power. In other words, perfect for Abraham to milk his title against.

Abraham, 32, has turned his career around with three straight wins over Pablo Farias, Piotr Wilczewski and Robert Stieglitz in his last three fights. Abraham defeated Stieglitz to capture the WBO title with a 12 round unanimous decision in his last fight in August. In the Super Six tournament, Abraham was badly schooled by Andre Dirrell, Andre Ward and even Carl Froch, losing to all three. He did beat Jermain Taylor by knocking him out in the 12th round in his first fight in the tournament, but that’s not a big deal because Taylor went into the tournament having been beaten recently by Kelly Pavlik and Froch.

I was hoping that Abraham at least would defend his WBO title against someone like George Groves. That would have been interesting to see how Abraham’s power would do against Groves. But it looks like Abraham is going to look for smaller guys from the middleweight division. I wonder how long the WBO will allow Abraham to do this before they put their foot down and actually make him fight his mandatory?