By Jim Dower: WBA World middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs (31-1 28 KOs) will be making his fourth defense of his WBA 160lb title in two months from now on July 30 against an opponent still to be determined at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Jacobs, 28, will be fighting on the undercard of the Leo Santa Cruz vs. Carl Frampton fight. Former WBO middleweight champion Andy Lee (34-3-1, 24 KOs) is a possible opponent for Jacobs.
Jacobs last fought in December of last year in stopping Peter Quillin in the 1st round. With the ease of the win, Jacobs should have been back in the ring by now. By the time Jacobs fights in July, he’ll have been out of the ring for seven months. That’s not good when you’re a world champion fighting in the same division as Gennady Golovkin.
The World Boxing Association will soon be ordering Jacobs to fight Golovkin, and it’ll be decision time for Jacobs and his manager Al Haymon whether to vacate the WBA to avoid Triple G. We saw one of Haymon’s fighters in Quillin vacate his WBO title in order to avoid a fight against Matt Karobov in 2014.
The most didn’t work out too well for Quillin because he missed out on a payday against Korovbov in a fight he might have won, and there’s a good possibility that Quillin would still be a world champion today if he’d taken the fight.
Jacobs will be safe from the Golovkin fight until Golovkin gets through with the WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. Once that fight happens or doesn’t happen, the WBA will order Jacobs to fight Golovkin and it’ll be decision time for Haymon. It’s likely that Jacobs will vacate his WBA title rather than take the Golovkin fight and lose by a likely knockout.
Haymon will need to be careful in who he puts with Jacobs for his July fight because if he matches him against someone too good, he’ll wind up losing. Jacobs has a nice 11-fight winning streak dating back to 2010, but he’s only fought one good opponent during all of those years and that was his fight against Quillin.
Jacobs was able to hurt Quillin with a right hand in the opening seconds of the fight. Jacobs then flurried on him until the fight was stopped. If Quillin had fought a little more cautious, he might have been able to box his way to a victory. It was a bad fight for Quillin.
Here are the current top 15 contenders in the World Boxing Association’s rankings:
1. Alfonso Blanco
2. Chris Eubank Jr.
3. Dmitry Chudinov
4. Tureano Johnson
5. Arif Magomedov
6. Rob Brant
7. Peter Quillin
8. Avtandil Khurtsidze
9. Ryota Murata
10. Adam Etches
11. John Ryder
12. Dominic Wade
13. Gary O’Sullivan
14. Anthony Dirrell
15. Ievgen Khytrov
If Jacobs doesn’t fight Lee, then he might opt to take an easy lower ranked contender to keep him from losing his title. Jacobs has had recent safe fights against fringe contenders Sergio Mora and Caleb Truax. Jacobs is overdue to fight a mandatory challenger. It’ll be interesting to see how long the WBA will wait before they finally order Jacobs to face his mandatory. If they don’t push it, then I don’t see Jacobs taking any risks.