By Keith Idec

NEW YORK – Their majority draw doesn’t sit well with Badou Jack, but he has no problem with how judges scored the first round and how those decisions impacted their final scorecards Saturday night.

DeGale landed a straight left hand late in the first round and an off-balance Jack went to the canvas with 32 seconds to go in the first round. All three judges – Glenn Feldman, Julie Lederman and Steve Weisfeld – scored the first round 10-8 in favor of Jack.

Those scores helped DeGale secure a majority draw with Jack in their super middleweight championship unification fight at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Had Feldman, Lederman and Weisfeld scored the first round 10-9 for DeGale because Jack might’ve done enough before the knockdown to have been winning that round, Sweden’s Jack (20-1-3, 12 KOs) would’ve won a split decision (114-113, 114-113, 113-114).

Partially because they all scored the first round 10-8 for London’s DeGale (23-1-1, 14 KOs), Feldman scored the 12-rounder for DeGale (114-112), while Lederman and Weisfeld scored the bout even by the same score (113-113).

“I thought I won the first round until [the knockdown],” Jack said during the post-fight press conference. “My balance wasn’t that good. He caught me with a flash knockdown. He’s slapping a lot. It looks good to the judges, but it’s not effective. It’s no clean punches or anything. When I heard [the] CompuBox [statistics], that I landed more cleaner shots, a hundred more punches or something like that – I don’t know [63 more overall].”

Jack didn’t dispute the knockdown, though.

“It was a knockdown because I went down,” Jack said. “But it was a flash knockdown. I’ve gotta watch it again. I thought my foot was, I don’t know … it was a flash knockdown. I wasn’t hurt, but this is boxing. Things happen.”

Like Jack, Floyd Mayweather Jr. thought the final scorecards submitted by Feldman, Lederman and Weisfeld were way off. Yet Mayweather, whose company promotes Jack, didn’t have a problem with the first-round knockdown, either.

“I’m always honest,” Mayweather said. “It was a clear knockdown.”

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for krikya360.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.