By Keith Idec

While Sergio Mora was busy discrediting Daniel Jacobs’ fight-ending knockdown, Jacobs acknowledged that Mora made him pay for becoming careless during their August 2015 fight.

The WBA world middleweight champion floored Mora with a short right hand just after the midway mark of the first round. Intent to score a first-round knockout, Jacobs became overly aggressive and paid a steep price for it.

Exactly 20 seconds after dropping Mora, Jacobs found himself on the seat of his trunks. Mora’s counter left hook dropped Jacobs and reminded him that even supposedly powerless opponents are dangerous. Jacobs reached his feet quickly and stopped Mora in the second round, when Mora suffered a right ankle injury as he fell to the canvas for the second time in their scheduled 12-rounder at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.

“Listen, there’s always opportunities to learn and grow in the sport of boxing,” Jacobs said during a conference call Tuesday to discuss their September 9 rematch. “Even with a light-punching guy like Sergio Mora, I learned a valuable lesson, that after I knocked him down and I was going in for the kill, that you still have to be defensive-minded, even when you have a guy hurt.

“Because I was on the verge of stopping this man. There’s no way around that. I was definitely on the verge of stopping him. But in my mind I got a little careless. And the way I had my feet spread, I just got caught with a real clean shot. Nothing I can take away from him – he earned that. But it was a valuable lesson for me and a [mistake] I won’t make again.”

Spike will televise the second bout between Brooklyn’s Jacobs (31-1, 28 KOs) and Los Angeles’ Mora (28-4-2, 9 KOs) from Santander Arena in Reading, Pennsylvania. The telecast is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT with an IBF lightweight championship match that’ll pit Robert Easter Jr. (17-0, 14 KOs), of Toledo, Ohio, against Ghana’s Richard Commey (24-0, 22 KOs).

Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.