Plans for championship matches and key main events in several different weight classes had to be changed based on the fallout of UFC 156 on 2/2 at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas.
The PPV show featured three major upsets. Alistair Overeem, coming off his drug suspension, was knocked out in the third round by Antonio Bigfoot Silva. Overeem, who was big and muscular, but not at the freaky level of a year ago, had won the first two rounds and seemed on the way to a lackluster decision. When the third round came out, both men charged the ring and bonked heads. Overeem got the worst of the collision, and suddenly Silva was teeing off on him and finished him.
While nothing has been said yet, nor have any deals been completed, the new heavyweight direction if all goes well would be Velasquez vs. Silva for the title and Overeem vs. Junior Dos Santos as a No. 2 fight on the same show, tentatively on 5/25 in Las Vegas.
With Rashad Evans losing to Antonio Rogerio Nogueira via decision, all talk of Anderson Silva defending against Evans, cutting to 185 is out the window, leaving a clear path for Silva vs. Chris Weidman, earmarked for the summer, when Weidman is able to return after shoulder surgery.
In the main event, featherweight champion Jose Aldo Jr. won a close decision over Frankie Edgar. Aldos next opponent came out of left field, in Anthony Pettis. Pettis had been scheduled to face the winner of the Benson Henderson vs. Gilbert Melendez lightweight title match coming off his quick finish of Donald Cerrone on 1/26. But after Aldo beat Edgar, Pettis texted Dana White, said he could make 145 and wanted a shot at Aldo. White put the match together, which left Ricardo Lamas furious. Lamas, when beating Erik Koch on 1/26, thought he was going to get a shot at the winner. There is at least movement of putting Lamas vs. Chan Sung Jung with the winner getting the next shot.
Aldo vs. Pettis is earmarked for an 8/3 PPV date that would come from either Las Vegas, Texas, Rio de Janeiro or Chicago. It was a surprise because there was a good chance whoever emerged as lightweight champion after 4/20 would be ready to face Pettis by that time. Pettis said he would rather face Aldo, saying he thought the featherweight champion was a tougher opponent than the lightweight champion and he piked that title first because he wanted to test himself against the better fighter. He did say his goal would be eventually to face the lightweight champion. Dana White indicated to us that should Pettis win, hed want him to defend the title at featherweight a couple of times before giving him a chance to become the first simultaneous two weight class champion.
In addition, Joseph Benavidez won a decision over Ian McCall to put him as a solid No. 2 in the flyweight division behind only champion Demetrious Johnson. Benavidez and McCall were the top two contenders, but Johnson beat Benavidez to become the first champion on 9/22 in Toronto. It would be quick for a rematch, but the division doesnt have a lot of depth.
The show drew a near sellout of 10,275 with a gate of $2,437,000 according to an announcement by UFC officials after the show. The breakdown of the gate should be available next week.
We dont have a PPV figure at press time, but early returns indicate it did better than most expectations, far more than any prior show headlined by Aldo, as well as more than any headlined by Edgar. A lot of the success was due to the depth, most notably Overeem and Evans in the No. 2 and No. 3 matches.
The big surprise were the TV ratings for the prelims on FX, which did 1,897,000 viewers, the largest audience for any MMA television show since the company had moved its top cable programming to FX at the beginning of 2012. It broke the 1,860,000 record set two weeks earlier for the main card of the Vitor Belfort vs. Michael Bisping fight. The surprise is that the prelims were headlined by Evan Dunham vs. Gleison Tibau, and the other three fights were fighters in their UFC debuts, coming over from Strikeforce.
It was also the second largest audience ever for prelims, behind only the 2.0 million set on the February 5, 2011, show on Spike that featured matches with Chad Mendes and Donald Cerrone. Historically, the Super Bowl Saturday night prelims have always done strong numbers and that doesnt necessarily correlate to PPV. In 2010, Spike set a prelims record on Super Bowl Saturday with 1.7 million viewers before the UFC 109 PPV that did less than 300,000 buys.
In the main event, Frankie Edgar became the real Heartbreak Kid, arguably the best fighter in UFC history to lose three fights in a row. Aldo got the decision on scores of 49-46, 48-47 and 49-46 of a fight that could have been reasonably scored either way. There were three solid rounds, with Aldo winning the first and second and Edgar winning the fourth. Rounds three and five could have gone either way. I had Edgar winning both of those rounds and taking the fight. Our poll was close, with Aldo at 51%, Edgar at 44% and 6% having it even. When it came to significant strikes landed, Aldo had a 21-5 and 19-7 edge in the first two rounds. Edgar had a 15-11, 11-7 and 18-14 edge in rounds three through five, although Aldos punches that landed were harder. Edgar got a few momentary takedowns but there was no groundwork to speak of. Aldo landed more to the head, and Edgar, whose face was cut up while Aldos wasnt, looked the worse for wear.
Dana White said he thought it was close, that Aldo won, but that he didnt see doing an immediate rematch. He also said he didnt want Edgar fighting at lightweight, even though he spent most of his career there and had been champion at that weight. You could make an argument still should be based on his last fight with Benson Henderson, where the majority of viewers thought he won. White felt that constantly fighting against guys so much bigger than him wasnt good for his career long-term. Edgars real weight was about 158 when he fought at 155, which is about the size of some of the bigger bantamweights. Edgar was disappointed, perhaps crushed, coming in on the wrong end of three close decisions in a row in title fights. He didnt have an answer as to whether hed try and cut to 135, or try to pick up some wins at 145 to try and get a rematch. He was the first fighter since Aldo had come to the U.S. to fight him close enough to where the outcome was in question.
NBC Sports (formerly Versus) has signed a three-year deal with the Las Vegas-based World Series of Fighting Organization for six shows per year.
The WSOF ran a debut show on 11/3, from Las Vegas, broadcast on NBC Sports. The show was a time buy. Numbers were significantly lower than the station used to get with the WEC, let alone what they were doing in 2011 with UFC. The 198,000 viewers, while lower than the 270,000 that boxing averaged on the station (and way below WEC, which ranged from 300,000 to 1.44 million), is still a higher number than all but a few events that the station carries.
To their credit, going in, between all the expenses of signing fighters, having to run in a city where they had little shot at selling a lot of tickets, and buying their way onto TV, they went deep in the hole financially. The only way to make it today in MMA unless you are UFC, unless youre doing small shows and paying fighters nothing, is to get a TV deal that covers costs. Since NBC Sports, as Versus, had a history with both WEC and later UFC, they are used to paying a certain level for shows. As weve seen with plenty of companies, even when having a TV deal that pays, they manage to spend far more than that deal pays and wind up out of business. The key here is to keep costs below that number, but have enough in the way of name fighters to at least draw an audience. Their first show was entertaining, but in running Saturday nights they are going to be running head-to-head frequently with UFC events.
This new deal begins with a show on 3/23 from Atlantic City at the Revel Casino, with a scheduled main event of Anthony Johnson vs. Andrei Arlovski. Johnson and Arlovski were both winners on the first show and the two biggest names with the promotion. Johnson fought at welterweight in UFC, but missed weight on a few occasions, and then moved to middleweight, where he also missed weight. He fought as a light heavyweight in the first WSOF show. Johnson was gigantic fighting 170-pounders, as hes about 208 in shape, or the size of a normal middleweight. He would be way undersized as a heavyweight, although Arlovski hasnt been a top level heavyweight in years.
Its going to be tough since virtually all the marketable talent is in UFC, and most of the second level of talent is in Bellator. Just the fact that they had to put their two biggest stars, from different weight classes, together for a first show main event makes me wonder about the matchmaking going forward. Johnson would be in UFC, but was fired for missing weight on too many occasions.
Other matches announced for the first show are Marlon Moraes, who beat Miguel Angel Torres on the first show, facing Tyson Nam, who beat Bellators bantamweight champion Eduardo Dantas, on a non-Bellator show on 8/25 in Rio de Janeiro; former UFC fighter David Branch vs. former WEC champion and Pride star Paulo Filho; former UFC fighter Josh Burkman vs. Ryan LaFlare and former Dream star J.Z. Cavalcante vs. Justin Gaethje, plus Igor Gracie will appear.
The deal was said to have been completed a few weeks ago but wasnt officially announced until 2/4.
Dana Whites surgery on his left ear to combat Menieres Disease has not been a success at this point. White said to us on 2/5 that the surgery may have been the worst decision of his life. The surgery was supposed to have a 70 percent chance of alleviating the problem, but instead, hes been having regular attacks that has put him in a lot of pain and given him terrible mood swings. He said he had a really painful attack on 2/4 in particular.
UFC announced this past week that they would be doing official top ten rankings for the first time since the early days of the company (where the old management actually did mock rankings putting in people like Mike Tyson and Alexander Karelin). They will be doing top ten in each division as well as a pound-for-pound top ten. It will be done based on voting by accredited members of the MMA media, using on its broadcast and in all its promotional properties. The ratings started this past week and will be updated after every show (or pretty much every week or two) and released two days after each show. They invited 90 reporters to vote, of which 28 did. There were a number of people asked who declined because they felt it was a conflict of interest. Of the people that I would consider the best full-time MMA reporters, almost none of them ended up voting. It should be noted that these ratings will have very little factor in booking (actually I was told no factor whatsoever), in the sense they are going to book matches based on what they perceive the mass audience would most want to see. The day the ratings came out, they finalized the Aldo vs. Pettis fight where a guy who had no fights in the featherweight division and wasnt ranked was getting the next title shot due to the belief its in this case both the best and most marketable fight they can give Aldo right now. In that sense, it makes no sense to have the promotion release official ratings because all it can do is make them look silly when they themselves book GSP vs. Nick Diaz, or Aldo vs. Pettis or when their own rankings have Johny Hendricks as the top contender and they put someone else in the title match. Now they are going to be promoting a Jon Jones vs. Chael Sonnen matches when Sonnen doesnt even have a top-ten ranking in the division in their own rankings. It was joked to me by those in the company that UFC was doing it because they wanted to make sure there were more things for them to be criticized about. The reality behind it is that FOX wanted official rankings to advertise fights and promote on television, similar to rankings voted on by reporters for college football and college basketball. They felt UFC needed to have them approved, but they would have no credibility coming from directly from UFC. So the decision was made to have the media vote on them. White said that if they had only nine of 90 reporters doing it, they were still going to publish them and use them. Beforehand, with no official rankings and booking for the masses (as in the big picture for all their business partners in growing the sport is to do fights that people most want to see), while people will complain, 95% of their fan base doesnt care. When they go on television and say so-and-so- is the No. 1 contender and somebody else is getting a title shot, then even their mass audience is going to think something is weird. Plus, are reporters going to rank a guy suspended for failing a drug test as the No. 1 contender based on one win coming off a suspension, or with no wins and his suspension ending? Logically, when you are suspended, you should have to earn your ranking back from scratch if you are doing legit rankings, although Nick Diaz walked into being ranked No. 3 at welterweight. Plus, theyve had enough issues with fighters citing web site rankings for turning down fights, but now, with UFC having their own rankings, people will cite those as official, as they should, as a reason to turn down a fight with a dangerous opponent who isnt ranked if they are ranked, saying how it makes no sense. Plus, itll make contract negotiations more difficult, but as noted, those are difficult enough as it is. Agents for No. 6 who is being paid less than No. 8 will start complaining and use the numbers as justification, although to an extent privately those things were happening anyway.
