Another UFC event has come and gone leaving a bad taste in the mouth of those shelling out $50 for the pay-per-view fights. Lets all breath a collective yawn and get ready for the next uninspiring card that will air in three weeks.
UFC 106 was viewed by many as the weakest event of the year due to the cancellation of the main event featuring Brock Lesnar and Shane Carwin. Even before the original main event was cancelled, not much interest was being generated on what was expected to be a main event mismatch of grand proportions.
Dana White Is Concerned About Judging, Not Fight Quality
How did Dana White try to fix the hole in the event? Well, lets sell Ortiz/Griffin as the main event and we’ll plug in Koscheck/Johnson as co-feature even though they will have just 3 weeks of training. People will drink the koolaid, just got to mix in the sugar.
This is now five straight events that were below the standards of the normal UFC product we’ve come to know. Uninteresting main events, weak undercards and too much WWE-laden drama. While UFC 107 stands to offer an interesting set of overall fights for the first time in months, the main event will be an extreme mismatch for the lightweight championship belt.
Which brings forward the question…are there really any true contenders out there for the championship belts?
If you breakdown each weight class, outside of light heavyweight, the gap between the champions and the “#1 Contenders” is widening. Lesnar, Anderson Silva, George St. Pierre and BJ Penn are all at no immediate risk of losing their belts. There is nobody coming up the ranks to deliver a challenge, which poses a big problem for the UFC. Whose the next real contender?
Great fighting events are defined by the main feature. Nobody goes home remembering the warmup fights. In fact, people don’t start streaming into the arena until the last couple of fights. The UFC cannot expect to sustain its dominance if it cannot fix the top of its fight cards. To fix these problems, here are a few things that the UFC is going to need to address:
- Reduce the number of events per year
- Larger win bonuses, lower minimum purse
- Begin fostering new fighter development
- Start cross-promoting with other organizations
The biggest problem with the UFC right now is that they are doing too many fights. When you couple this with not increasing the number of fighters under the promotion, it decreases the quality of the events. The UFC is clearly going after cash while sacrificing product quality and hording its profits. This has to stop soon or it is going to come back to bite them. If you can’t increase the number of fighters in the stable, you cannot put on this many events.
As shown during Season 1 of Bellator, if you hang the money carrot you get better fights. While Bellator didn’t have many of the big name fighters, just ask anyone that attended an event whether they got their money’s worth on the tickets. What made for the better fights was the incentive to win and the fighters went for the kill. In the UFC, the fighters are more worried about their next payday versus their current, and this can only be recitified by lowering their guaranteed purses and making them work for the payout.
Next, please put The Ultimate Fighter out of its misery. The show has turned into Big Brother inside of a cage. Its no longer about fighter development, its about tv ratings and advertiser dollars. How else can you explain the sad sacks on display in TUF 10 or the unbelievable decision to not invite the up-and-comer Tyron Woodley for TUF 9. Its about finding “personalities”, not fighters. The UFC needs talent development. When was the last time an undercard fighter made his debut with the UFC? I can’t recall. Reliance on the smaller promotions to build fighters and stealing them is not a long-term strategy for success.
And finally, the time for Dana White to swallow his pride and acknowledge that the other organizations now have equal fighter quality has come. Nobody wants to see BJ Penn fight anyone in the UFC, they want to see him against Shinya Aoki or Eddie Alvarez. Do you want to pay $50 to watch Silva slaughter the talentless UFC foes, or would you rather see him fight Jake Shields, Hector Lombard or Gegard Mousasi. And do I even need to bring up commentary about the heavyweight division…Fedor?
The time is now for the UFC to shore up its product. No more whiny calf sniveling from Dana White about the poor judging. This issue with the UFC latest string of fights has nothing to do with judges…it has everything to do with a stale business model that is prepared to get knocked down by the competition if it cannot recognize the error in its current strategy.
Tags: anderson silva, bellator, bj penn, brock lesnar, eddie alvarez, fedor emelianenko, gegard mousasi, george st. pierre, hector lombard, jake shields, mixed martial arts, mma, ufc
