By Dan Ambrose: WBA World middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs) has analyzed IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin’s game and he’s seen some defensive holes that he’s going to expose on March 18 in their battle on HBO PPV at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Jacobs has been studying the 34-year-old Golovkin for some time, and he sees all that he needs to see of the many build in limitations in his game to beat him. Besides the defensive problems in GGG’s game, Jacobs notices that he’s slow of hand. Jacobs sees his own hand speed, power and defensive skills to be ultimately too much for GGG when he gets him inside the ring in this important fight.
This match could take Jacobs’ career to the next level or it could sink it into the quagmire that it once was after his knockout loss to Russian Dmitry Pirog in 2010. Jacobs says that wasn’t him on that night. He’s improved since then, he feels. That is impossible to know from the limited opposition the 29-year-old Jacobs has been matched up against by his manager Al Haymon.
Jacobs has won his last 12 fights, but against lesser opposition. Jacobs’ won big win during his entire career was against the 33-year-old Peter Quillin, who has always been a flawed fighter himself. Quillin was exposed by Andy Lee last year in fighting to a draw against him and getting knocked down in the process. If you take away Jacobs’ win over Quillin, you’re left with wins over the likes of Caleb Truax, Jarrod Fletcher, Ishe Smith and Sergio Mora as his best wins. Those are not relevant fighters in this day and age in boxing at 160. Jacobs has been winning since his loss to Pirog, but he’s been fighting poor opposition the entire time.
“I’m making sure I bring the best me to the table, because I definitely see a lot of flaws in his game and I definitely see me capitalizing,” Jacobs said to Boxingtalk.com.
For Jacobs to expose the flaws in Golovkin’s game, he’s going to need to stand his ground and not retreat around the ring like he did against Pirog. Jacobs couldn’t stand up to the pressure that Pirog put on him. That was the story of the fight. Jacobs had the better hand speed than Pirog, but he wasn’t willing to take the shots from him that he needed to take for him to have a chance of winning. It came down to Jacobs not trusting his own chin. That’s why he lost. You can argue that Jacobs might not have had the chin to begin with for him to stand and have a dog fight against Pirog. Earlier in Jacobs’ career, he was staggered by Ishe Smith in 2009. Jacobs did not look good in that fight. He looked in distress from the power of Smith, who isn’t known for being a big puncher.
“It’s the basics,” said Jacobs about GGG. “He doesn’t really have a great defence and my speed enables me to elude a lot of punches, my power allows me to hurt guys.”
The guys that Jacobs has been hurting haven’t had anything to hurt him back. We’re talking light hitters like Sergio Mora, Fletcher, and Truax. Quillin had some power, but he was never a big puncher. Quillin was more of a speed guy, and he’s never really beaten anyone good other than Hassan N’Dam.
Quillin is just another fighter with a padded record in the same way that Jacobs’ record is padded. When Quillin and Jacobs got together in their fight, it was two very similar fighters with a lot of weak opposition on their records. When you look at Jacobs and Quillin’s records, it’s hard to believe these guys have gone their entire careers facing the type of opposition they’ve faced. There’s a lack of quality on their resumes. Golovkin doesn’t have a lot of names either, but he at least has David Lemieux, Willie Monroe Jr., Kell Brook, Marco Antonio Rubio and Martin Murray. Monroe Jr. would give Jacobs a lot of problems with his fighting style. As far as the stronger boxing record, Golovkin has faced the better opponents than Jacobs in my view.
“This is the biggest challenge of my career and I would want to go in there as the underdog, because you’re right, it does give you that extra motivation,” said Jacobs.
It’s not a badge of honor that the odds-makers have Jacobs as the underdog against Golovkin. The reason they see the 29-year-old Brooklyn native Jacobs as the underdog against Triple G is because they’ve obviously spotted the weak resume filled with poor opposition since his knockout loss to Pirog. They’ve seen Jacobs get dropped by the light hitting Sergio Mora in their first fight. That’s not good news when you’re getting dropped by a weak puncher like Mora. It’s a sign that your chin is not what it should be. Jacobs was actually hurt by Mora. If you look at that fight again, Jacobs was on weak legs after he got up off the canvas in the 1st round. Mora was knocked down too, but it was Jacobs who was the one that was hurt from the knockdown. It was extremely fortunate for Jacobs that he was in the ring with a guy that didn’t have the punching power to finish him off in round one, because if it had been Golovkin inside the ring with him on that night, I doubt Jacobs would have seen the 2nd round.
I think Jacobs needs more experience before fighting someone of Golovkin’s caliber, but he doesn’t have time on the clock to get that experience. The time for Jacobs to have been put in with better opposition should have taken place between 2012 and 2016. Those were four wasted years for Jacobs. Now it’s too late. He’s being thrown in the ring with Golovkin without having any experience against good opposition. The outcome of this fight is pretty obvious.
When you go into a fight like this without the prerequisite fights, you get obliterated and that’s what I see happening to Jacobs on March 18. He doesn’t belong in the ring with GGG, and that much is going to be obvious from the 1st round, as Jacobs runs around the ring trying to get away from Golovkin. It’s going to be a repeat of the Golovkin vs. Pirog fight, but I see this fight ending a lot quicker with Jacobs getting knocked out within two rounds. He’ll be another Marco Antonio Rubio and Dominic Wade.