Mixed martial arts had a tremendous year om 2009. The UFC put on more fights, garnered its largest attendance levels and generated the most revenue in the history of the company and the sport. Everything was clicking on all cylinders and mixed martial arts is on the cusp of a breakthrough. All of this in spite of a struggling economy
Happy New Year UFC
With all the success, Dana White and his organization have still not reached the pinnacle, that being reaching a mainstream sports audience. To reach that “tipping point”, as defined by Malcolm Gladwell in his famous book, White and the UFC must make a few changes to its business to make mixed martial arts. Once those changes are implemented, the unstoppable force will come into line and take MMA mainstream.
The following are a few New Year’s Resolutions for the UFC to consider that will finally get mixed martial arts into the mainstream.
Resolution #1 – Pay The Fighters
If the UFC is the elite promotion, then it should pay fighters correlative to the gate. Over the course of 2009, many other promotions are sharing the proceeds at events at a much higher rate. Bellator Fighting Championship guaranteed its tournament champions $150k over the course of three fights. Strikeforce’s recent Evolution event featured on Showtime paid out $481k on a gate of $634k (76% of gate went to the fighters).
In contrast, Zuffa took in $818k at WEC 41 while paying out salaries of $216k or 26% of gate. For UFC 106, they took in a live gate of $3.00M and paid salaries of $1.02M, or 33% of the gate. At UFC 104, they took in a live gate of $1.9M and paid out $922k, or 48% of the gate. These revenue figures do not include PPV revenue and sponsorship fees. When included, this doubles to triple the gross receipts. What we can surmise is that fighters appear to be getting about 10%-20% of revenue. The remainder goes into Zuffa’s pockets.
The UFC needs to begin improving its payouts into the 75%-100% neighborhood of live gate. The fighters are being paid peanuts in relation to the revenue they are generating. If improvements don’t occur, expect more defection like that of Dan Henderson in 2010.
#2 – Fine Tune or Cancel “The Ultimate Fighter”
The original concept of The Ultimate Fighter served as a launching pad for the organization in 2005. It introduced the sport to new fans and found a special recipe of connecting the fighters personally with the fans. The most recent season jumped the shark and has shown that the reality show is not about creating a training ground for new fighters, it’s just Big Brother in a cage where losers of the fight are banished from the house.
Not since 2007, Season 5, has the show produced a quality contender. The focus has shifted to personality rather than fighting ability. Season 10 epitomizes the problem. While scoring record-level ratings with its media barrage of Kimbo Slice, his time in the house helped him little and he displayed why he should not have been considered for the show during the TUF 10 Finale.
Either the show needs to return to its roots of seeking out talent or the UFC should shut it down. The Ultimate Fighter is part of the branding of MMA, and the circus-like stench of the show lowers the sport to the ranks of professional wrestling.
Resolution #3 – Make The Best Championship Fights By Cross Promoting
The UFC’s biggest issue for 2010 is the lack of bonafide championship belt matches. Outside of the light heavyweight division, there are no interesting championship bouts on the horizon. Anderson Silva, George St. Pierre, BJ Penn and Brock Lesnar are head and shoulders ahead of their competition. Simply put, who is left in the UFC for these guys to beat?
Fans want to see Lesnar hook up with Fedor Emelianenko. They want to watch Penn hook it up against Shinya Aoki or Eddie Alvarez. They are aching for GSP to fight Marius Zaromskis or Jay Hieron. Or how about Anderson Silva against Jake Shields or Gegard Mousasi?
For the good of the sport, the UFC must break its stance on cross-promotion that will help the sport as a whole breakthrough. The upcoming “Dynamite” event in Japan that pairs DREAM and Sengoku’s best fighters is the road map for the future. If the UFC’s champs are truly that great, then what is the issue?
Resolution #4 – Expand The Number Of Fighters Under Contract
While the UFC has expanded the number of events it hosts, the number of new fighter signings have not increased at the same rate of growth. This has left the UFC to regurgitate the same fighters over and over again on its PPV broadcast. You can really only enjoy so much of the same guys until it gets old…and old quickly.
The great thing about combat sports is the belief that there always somebody coming up the ladder behind you to take your belt. As noted previously, none of this is happening in the UFC. The champs stand at the top and the contenders are a few rungs below, not one. This can only be turned around by signing new fighters and developing them.
Recent contract cancellations for Jake Rosholt and Brock Larson are key examples of bad judgment by the UFC. These guys were thrown to the lions immediately and tossed out with the garbage after two losses. If you want to develop fighters, black marks eventually have to occur on their record. Every UFC champ has a blemish on their record. Its better these blemishes occur in the UFC rather than elsewhere.
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.
A mystique hovers over this man, simply known as Fedor by mixed martial arts fans. Having fought almost exclusively in Japan, Fedor was an unknown entity to most MMA fans here in the USA, leaving them blood thirsty for a chance to learn more about him. Last night, the Russian phenom was given his grand stage, a national primetime broadcast audience on CBS, and he didn’t leave the fans disappointed as he pushed his record to 31-1 with a TKO victory over previously unbeaten Brett Rogers (10-1) at the Strikeforce / M-1 Global event.
A matchup between a standup brawler in Rogers and the sambo expert Emelianenko was sure to be electric with action and it started right at the bell. Rogers was the first to draw blood, literally, with a snapping jab that broke Emelianenko’s nose just seconds into the fight, sending a flow of blood streaming onto the fighters’ bodies and the mat.
Rogers was able dictate the pace early in the first round and place Emelianenko on the defensive. Rogers even impressed on the ground, Emelianenko’s domain, fending off a quick submission attempt with relative ease. The nine-year veteran Emelianenko maintained his calm demeanor in the cage and waited for his opening as Rogers continued his aggressive approach. As the first round wore on, Emelianenko shifted the momentum of the fight, scoring both on his feet and on the ground as the round came to a close.
As the second round began, Emelianenko had the air of confidence as he came to center while Rogers appeared somewhat winded. Rogers showed hesitancy to keep the fight in a boxing / striking mode given the shots delivered by Emelianenko and changed his strategy to clinchig along the cage wall. After some inaction, referee “Big” John McCarthy moved the fight back to center and that is where it ended. With a cat-like pouncing attack, Emelianenko landed a right hook that crumpled Rogers to the canvas and brought the TKO stoppage at 1:48 of the second round.
The six-plus minutes that Emelianenko waged in the cage displayed to Americans that the title of best pound-for-pound MMA fighters is certainly deserved. Emelianenko brings forward a combination of power, agility, precision, determination and technique that is not present in other fighters within the sport. He displayed capabilities that showed exactly how far behind his opponents are in the heavyweight division. It is a rarity to see a man of this size put on an exhibition of skills normally seen in fighters half his size.
So what does Emelianenko’s victory and Strikeforce’s CBS event mean to the sport of MMA? First, it displayed that the UFC has not cornered the market on talent. Placing the current UFC champ Brock Lesnar into the cage with Emelianenko would be criminal given Lesnar’s complete lack of martial arts experience. Strikeforce, along with other burgeoning MMA promotions like DREAM and Bellator, are showing MMA fans that they can look beyond the recent slate of disappointing UFC events.
Second, it has brought a spotlight to the mainstream sports viewing audience that MMA is more sport than carnival atmosphere that has been radiating from UFC’s entanglement with Spike’s pro wrestling audience and the TUF reality show which is more like the TV show Big Brother than a training ground to find the next contender.
For Emelianenko and Strikeforce, the question is what’s next? With reports circulating at Sherdog that Emelianenko broke his nose and injured his hand, there may be a delay until the next fight as he recuperates from the injury. Rumors are swirling that his next fight under the Strikeforce banner will come against Fabricio Werdum, a unanimous decision winner on last night’s undercard. After that, it appears a matchup against Alistair Overeem should he re-dedicate himself to MMA rather than dallying in kickboxing. But are these the fights we want to see?
Inevitably it comes down to Emelianenko finding a way to come to terms with Dana White and the UFC to end the debate, as it will not cease until Emelianenko figuratively puts a sock in White’s mouth once and for all and dismantles his overhyped champion Brock Lesnar. Here’s hoping that White will see the light and realize the sport of MMA needs fights across promotions for its long-term success and that Emelianenko can take MMA to the next level of respectability in sports fan eyes.
