Jacobs vs Rosado results and highlights: Daniel Jacobs takes controversial split decision over Gabriel Rosado

Gabriel Rosado came incredibly close to a career-best win tonight in Florida, and had his heart broken more than normal by a split decision loss to Daniel Jacobs in the DAZN main event.

After a very close, tough-to-score, and frankly deadly dull fight, ring announcer Jeremiah Gallegos seemed to announce split decision scores for Rosado at first, noting that the winner was “from Philadelphia,” before quickly correcting himself and announcing Brooklyn’s Jacobs as the split decision victor:

Scores were 115-113 across the board, two going to Jacobs and one to Rosado. BLH also had the fight 115-113 for Jacobs in a chess match fight (if you’re being kind) that really could have gone either way.

You could argue neither fighter backed up their months of trash talk, but Jacobs (37-3, 30 KO) definitely didn’t, as his promise to beat Rosado (25-13-1, 14 KO) down never came close to happening, while a lot of people may come out of this thinking that Rosado’s claim that Jacobs is overrated is, in fact, true.

It was a tentative fight where neither man landed in double digits in any round save for Rosado landing exactly 10 punches in the eighth.

On the whole, CompuBox saw Jacobs, 33, landing 78 of 339 (23%) total punches, including 56 of 169 (33%) of his power punches. The 34-year-old Rosado was credited with 78 of 549 (14%) punches landed, and 55 of 242 (23%) of his power shots. Rosado threw a lot more jabs than Jacobs did, 307 to 170, but landed only one more, 23 to Jacobs’ 22.

“I didn’t think I did the best performance. I could’ve did a little bit better,” Jacobs said after the fight. “It’s my fault. We had a great camp and I obviously didn’t do everything I should have. I was looking for the right hand, but I guess I got right hand happy. I should’ve stuck to the game plan. He’s a game opponent. I didn’t think it was that close by far.”

At one point during the bout, Jacobs’ trainer asked him in the corner, “Did you bet on this fight?” Jacobs didn’t get the question at first, so it was repeated. “No,” Jacobs replied, and his trainer said he wanted to understand if he were trying to carry Rosado in the bout to get it to later rounds. But in his post-fight interview, Jacobs — whose deal with DAZN ended with this performance — tried to put on the best face about moving forward to “bigger and better” bouts.

“A fight like this is only for a stepping stone. I still feel like there’s more to me that hasn’t been seen,” Jacobs.

Rosado, as you’d expect, was a lot more emotional.

“Yo, I felt I won the fight. I surprised him. I out-boxed him, I out-jabbed him, I countered him, I made him miss big shots,” Rosado told Chris Mannix. “Even when they said the decision, he was disappointed. He had the look on his face of defeat. That man didn’t do nothing to me! He put more hands on Canelo and Golovkin than he did on me!”

Rosado continued, “This man went through a battle with GGG, he went through a battle with Canelo, and I made it look easy! I thought I made it look easy!” Rosado said. “I was jabbing up and down, I hit him with big right hands, I slipped and moved when it was time to, and it was time to exchange he really didn’t want to, he was the one doing the clinching.”

How did you score it?

Daniyar Yeleussinov TKO-2 Julius Indongo

Good win for Yeleussinov, the 2016 welterweight Olympic gold medalist from Kazakhstan. Sometimes Yeleussinov (10-0, 6 KO) has looked really impressive in his pro fights, other times it seems like the higher levels might be too much for him, like, when he gets in with the real top fighters someday.

But he wiped out Indongo (23-3, 12 KO) in this one, scoring knockdowns in the first and second rounds, and finishing him off quickly, as Terence Crawford and Regis Prograis did down at 140 before the Namibian, now 37, moved up. Indongo won the IBF 140-pound belt in 2016 by stopping Eduard Troyanovsky in 40 seconds, and proved that wasn’t just a fluke by unifiying with the WBA belt in 2017, beating Ricky Burns over 12 rounds on the road in Scotland. Those were legitimately good wins. But he’s 1-3 since then now, and the losses have all been blowouts. Against very good, even great fighters, mind you, but it’s clear he’s done as much as he’s going to do at the world level.

Indongo did get up both times, but he was done, by his own admission. It is what it is. He couldn’t deal with Yeleussinov’s timing and power, and saw no great reason to continue. That also means there’s no great reason for another promoter to put him in another fight on this level again, but one might.

Solid win for Yeleussinov, who at 29 should be as ready as he’s going to get, basically. There are still levels, but with PBC controlling so much of not just the very top tier at 147 but also the majority of the second-tier guys in the division, it really is tough to take good steps at welterweight for these guys.

Nikita Ababiy UD-6 Brandon Maddox

Matchroom Boxing

Probably not the performance you’d want to see from Ababiy (10-0, 6 KO) in his 10th pro fight, in all honesty. He still fought very raw, very sloppy, didn’t take advantage of Maddox gassing out pretty hard after two rounds. BLH scored this 58-56 for Ababiy, while all three judges had it 59-55 for the middleweight prospect.

Maddox (7-4-1, 5 KO) clearly won the first round here, and there was an argument for him in the fifth and sixth rounds, too. This wasn’t far off of being a really disappointing outcome for the 22-year-old “White Chocolate,” who admitted that he “learned a lot” with this fight, which is really never a bad thing for a young fighter to go through early in their career, at least so long as they actually do learn and adapt to what went wrong or nearly went wrong. He said after the bout he’d be focusing more on his boxing in training, which is probably a good idea, as we’ve seen him in his last two fights have some problems going to a Plan B when Plan A doesn’t crumble the opponent quickly.

Mahammadrasul Majidov TKO-3 Sahret Delgado

The 34-year-old Majidov is no joke, a three-time World Amateur Championships gold medalist (2011, 2013, and 2017) and a 2012 Olympic bronze medalist. The Azerbaijani fighter would like to fast track his career, and Eddie Hearn wants to do that for him, but it’s going to be a little tough to find opponents, probably.

Here, he was way too much for Delgado (8-1, 7 KO), a 26-year-old Puerto Rican who turned pro at 198 pounds six years ago and weighed in at 291 for this fight. And this had a pretty scary ending, with Majidov cracking Delgado with a right hand that had the Puerto Rican out on his feet.

First off, you have to give referee Samuel Burgos real credit for jumping in right there, because nothing good was going to happen after that shot. But Delgado was seriously shaken in the corner, to the point that Majidov was fully holding him upright until more people got there and got a stool in for him to sit down. We send our best to Delgado.

Emmanuel Tagoe MD-10 Mason Menard

Matchroom Boxing

Menard gave his usual very good effort here, and he gave Tagoe a lot more trouble than Tagoe was probably hoping to get, in all honesty, at least depending on your style preference. The judges had their thoughts, and I thought all could be reasonably explained — one had it even at 95-95, one had it 96-94 Tagoe, the other had it 98-92 Tagoe. I had 97-93 for Tagoe.

Tagoe (32-1, 15 KO) threw less punches, but landed more and as such was more accurate, and when he could keep the fight at some range, he was able to handle Menard (36-5, 25 KO) in relative comfort. But the 32-year-old Menard has been in with good fighters over the years, he knows how to handle himself in the ring, and there were times he was able to get inside on the 33-year-old Ghanaian and make things tougher.

Tagoe wants a fight with the likes of Ryan Garcia (or Luke Campbell, one could assume) or Devin Haney. He’s a solid contender, back end of the top 10 or just outside of it, but really doesn’t seem like any big threat to the better talents at the weight. Then again you never fully know until you fight. He’s at least a real lightweight and not old and/or coming off of an Achilles surgery, so he’d be a step up for Haney.