4 Takeaways from the Jake Paul vs. Nate Diaz Match | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats, and Rumors

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Everything’s big in Texas.

So what better place for the biggest circus in combat sports?

The traveling Jake Paul spectacle made its way to Dallas on Saturday night, when its signature ringmaster—who’s never met a camera he didn’t like—took on ex-UFC fan favorite Nate Diaz atop a six-bout pay-per-view show from the American Airlines Center.

Paul was shown arriving to the building shortly before 10 p.m. ET on a tank.

Yes, you read that correctly. A tank.

Diaz was making his pro boxing debut after finishing out his octagonal contract with Dana White last fall. Paul, meanwhile, was back for the first time since suffering his first career loss by split decision to Tommy Fury last February in Saudi Arabia.

Always up for a fight, the B/R combat sports team was in prime position to observe the mid-summer extravaganza and compile a definitive list of takeaways from the event. Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought of your own in the comments.

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There have been worse 10-rounders between better fighters. So no, neither Jake Paul nor Nate Diaz embarrassed themselves or the sport of boxing on Saturday night.

It didn’t devolve into a foul-fest during the fight. It didn’t erupt into a full-on rumble during the post-fight interviews each man gave in the center of the ring.

And the fans who packed the NHL/NBA arena in Dallas seemed pleased with the product.

Given the pre-fight nonsense that had occurred during the week, that’s a win-win-win.

Paul was forced to fight an entire 30 minutes for the first time in his brief career, and Diaz, though he reminded exactly no one of Ray Leonard or Muhammad Ali, stayed on his feet for all but a few seconds and actually landed a higher percentage (36 to 35) of his punches.

All three judges saw Paul a wide winner, giving him verdicts of 97-92, 98-91 and 98-91, which translates to seven rounds to three on one scorecard and eight rounds to two on the two others. B/R scored it for Paul, too, by a matching 98-91 count.

Statistically speaking, Paul threw 491 shots and landed 174 of them, including a pair of left hooks that left Diaz reeling in the first and knocked him down in the fifth.

Diaz, meanwhile, connected on 143 of 392 overall attempts, though ringside analyst Shawn Porter labeled many of them as “pillow punches” during his post-fight comments.

Porter, a former welterweight champion, graded Diaz’s performance as a D and labeled Paul as a B-minus or a high-C, though he conceded it delivered on its entertainment promise.

“I didn’t know what to expect coming it,” he said, “but this exceeded it.”

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This just in: Nate Diaz will never be a boxing champion.

He was a clear favorite of a partisan crowd in Dallas that erupted with every facial smirk and roughhouse tactic—but as for having chops as an in-ring combatant, not so much.

By comparison, in fact, a novice like Paul looked like an seasoned pro.

Diaz was damaged by the first solid punch he took, a looping left hand a minute into the first round, and he spent the remainder of those opening three minutes wobbling as referee Mark Calo-oy watched closely. The MMA veteran did survive the session and several more thereafter, but his offense never resembled anything beyond amateurish charges followed by flurries of slapping punches with little impact beyond fan titillation and announcer hyperbole.

A lead left hook to the temple sent Diaz tumbling through the ropes halfway through the fifth and he looked ready to go in its immediate aftermath, but Paul wasn’t able to land a fight-ending shot and instead seemed content to exploit his slower foe’s porous defense while getting on his toes and forcing the plodding 38-year-old to follow him around.

By all competitive measures, a swollen, red-faced Diaz was simply out of his element.

Would he beat Paul in a cage? Of course. In a street fight? Sure.

But in a boxing ring? No. Not a chance.

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Paul runs his own promotional company. And as much as the Diaz-loving crowd in Dallas might want to argue, he was clearly the A-side of this promotion.

So his next opponent will be his choice and no one else’s.

But his words indicated he’s not quite done with the Diaz family.

His post-fight remarks included reiteration of an earlier promise that he’d pay Diaz back for the boxing event by meeting him in an MMA match sanctioned by the Professional Fighters League, a burgeoning UFC rival in which he holds an ownership stake.

“I wanna run it back in MMA. 10 million is the offer in the PFL,” he said as Diaz stood alongside and nodded. “I won one, now it’s your chance in your home territory. Let’s do it.”

The PFL recently signed ex-UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, who’d long campaigned for a chance to cross over into boxing and was released by Dana White and stripped of his title earlier this year. Ngannou will meet heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury later this year in Saudi Arabia.

It also has relationships with boxers Claressa Shields and Amanda Serrano, both of whom have dipped their toes into the MMA waters in the past.

Also interested in a date with Paul is Diaz’s older brother, Nick, who appeared at ringside after Saturday’s fight and suggested he’d be a suitable next opponent.

Nick Diaz turned 40 on Wednesday and had gone 0-3 with a no-contest in his last four UFC fights, last winning in 2011.

“Don’t forget about the one and only,” he said. “I’d like to entertain something in the near future. I have a little bit of opportunity to open a little bit of a window. I’m motivated and I’m still a better fighter than anyone else out here doing this.”

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Perhaps lost amidst the P.T. Barnum theatrics of Saturday’s main eventers were the exploits of those more accurately labeled as “real” professionals.

Two of the fighters signed by Paul’s “Most Valuable Promotions” apparatus—multi-division women’s champion Amanda Serrano and teenage lightweight prodigy Ashton “H2O” Sylve—were among the featured players on the DAZN-broadcast PPV undercard.

The 19-year-old Sylve, who fought in Mexico five times before turning 18 and taking on work the U.S., scored his ninth KO in 10 career fights with a body-shot finish of 34-fight veteran William Silva with a single second remaining in the fourth round.

Silva, who’d lost four times to fighters with a combined record of 75-1, was dropped by a left to the belly in the second before taking the full 10-count after a left to the liver.

“He can punch,” Randy Gordon, former chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, told Bleacher Report. “Whew!”

Serrano, meanwhile, was the company’s first signee in September 2021 and earned the biggest paycheck of her career seven months later when she shared top billing on the first female-headlined boxing show at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

She dropped a reed-thin split decision to Katie Taylor that night but is 3-0 across 16 months since, adding a brutally one-sided decision over Heather Hardy in Saturday’s penultimate bout to retain her quartet of widely recognized featherweight championship belts.

Serrano, who’d also beaten Hardy on the scorecards four years ago in New York, is 45-2-1 since turning professional in 2009.

“Serrano is damn good,” Gordon said. “She lives and breathes boxing.”