quillin By Dan Ambrose: WBA “regular” middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs (30-1, 27 KOs) will be facing unbeaten former WBO 160lb champion Peter “Kid Chocolate” Quillin (32-0-1, 23 KOs) in the battle of Brooklyn this Saturday night on Showtime Championship Boxing at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

What will be interesting about the Jacobs-Quillin fight is if the winner of the contest will agree to fight undefeated IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (34-0, 31 KOs) so that they can attempt to capture the real WBA title instead of having to hold the minor strap, which you can argue is little more than an interim belt rather than the real thing.

Quillin would have a big hand speed advantage over Golovkin, but I’m not that would be enough for him to get the victory. Quillin might need more than for him to turn back a big puncher like Golovkin.

Golovkin would likely jump at the chance of fighting the winner of the Jacobs vs. Quillin fight. It would help him knock off another name in the division, and that would further cement his status as the best in the division. Quillin and Jacobs are both with adviser Al Haymon. The real question is would Haymon let Quillin or Jacobs fight the likes of Golovkin? It remains to be seen if he will.

If Jacobs can get past Quillin on Saturday, then he needs to continue to face quality opposition rather than going back to fighting the guys he’d been fighting recently. Since winning the WBA title last year, Jacobs has had two easy title defenses against Caleb Truax and Sergio Mora.

The good news that Jacobs or Quillin will have no choice but to fight a good opponent in their next fight if they want to kept the WBA “regular” middleweight title, because #1 WBA Chris Eubank Jr. is facing Gary “Spike” O’Sullivan on December 12th in a WBA 160lb eliminator bout. The winner becomes the mandatory for the winner of the Jacobs-Quillin fight, and will supposedly get the winner.

Unless Quillin and Jacobs’ adviser can steer them around the Eubank Jr-O’Sullivan winner, we should be seeing a good fight in early 2016 with the Quillin-Jacobs winner facing the Eubank Jr. vs. O’Sullivan winner. Hopefully, we don’t see Quillin or Jacobs vacating the WBA title in order to avoid fighting Eubank Jr. or O’Sullivan. Quillin vacated his WBO middleweight title in the past rather than face his #1 WBO mandatory challenger Matt Karobov.

Quillin is coming off of a really bad mismatch against Michael Zerafa in September. Quillin stopped the over-matched Zerafa in the 5th round in a fight that made no sense at all. It’s still unclear why Quillin’s adviser put him in with Zerafa at this point in his career. You don’t normally see a top contender put in with a C level fighter like Zerafa once they’ve gone their far in their careers.

Hopefully, Quillin’s adviser doesn’t continue this sort of thing in the future because Quillin isn’t young and he already lost a year of his career after giving up his WBO middleweight title in 2014.

Jacobs vs. Quillin start time: 9:00 p.m. ET/6:00 p.m. PT.

Where to watch: Showtime

Date: December 5th

Where to see it/location: Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York

Also on Saturday’s Jacobs-Quillin card is WBA “regular” featherweight champion Jesus Cuellar (27-1, 21 KOs) putting his “regular” 126lb title on the line against #9 WBA Jonathan Oquendo (26-4, 16 KOs) in the co-feature bout. This fight could very well eclipse the excitement of the main event due to the two fighter’s all-action style of fighting. This won’t have the herky-jerky style of fighting that we’ll likely see from Quillin in his fight against Jacobs.

Cuellar is a come forward type of fighter who likes to try and crush his opponents with big power shots. Cuellar is the WBA minor champions. The real WBA belt is held by WBA Super World featherweight champion Leo Santa Cruz. It would be interesting to see how Cuellar would do against Santa Cruz. Hopefully the two of them can face each other one of these days.

Oquendo, 32, is coming off of a surprise 10 round majority decision upset win over former two division world champion Jhonny Gonzalez last September. Oquendo has been beaten by Abner Mares, Wilfredo Vazquez Jr, Juan Manuel Lopez and Oscar Andrade in the past.