The UFC has never had a stretch of business as successful as the last 10 months, cracking the million-buy mark on pay-per-view five times. That’s one more than the entirety of its history to that point.
Stars, especially Conor McGregor and to a lesser extent Ronda Rousey, have driven that newfound success. Fans, as it turns out, buy name value when they decide to plunk down $60 for an evening’s entertainment.
Seeing that particular writing on the wall, the UFC has invested a great deal of time and energy trying to create new stars, breathlessly pushing young fighters like Sage Northcutt and Paige VanZant. But do they have what it takes to carry the banner for the UFC into the next decade? Will fans eventually be willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on the Paige and Sage Show?
Bleacher Report’s Steven Rondina and Patrick Wyman debate the future of the UFC’s star-making enterprise and who, if anyone, will emerge as a draw in the next few years.
Steven: We’re here again, Patrick, discussing the future.
Over the last few months we’ve been lucky enough to see a number of the biggest stars in the sport’s history enter the Octagon in quick succession. Anderson Silva, Brock Lesnar and Conor McGregor have all gotten into the cage since July.
On top of that, beloved fan favorites like Joanna Jedrzejczyk, Nate Diaz, Michael Bisping and Robbie Lawler have all put some work in. The future is bright, too, with the potential returns of Ronda Rousey, Georges St-Pierre and Jon Jones all looming on the horizon.
That said, with the exception of Jedrzejczyk, those stars all have one thing in common: They probably won’t be around much longer.
Silva, Bisping and Lawler are all old in the context of professional athletics. GSP, Lesnar and Diaz have all become “special attraction” type fighters, where they may or may not show up once a year. Jones, Rousey and McGregor have all openly discussed retiring young.
Back in 2011, MMA went through a massive transition as Chuck Liddell, BJ Penn, Randy Couture and Tito Ortiz were phased out quickly. We could be quickly approaching another year like that, Patrick, and so I wonder: Who can replace the current crop of talent?
Patrick: At this point, we can’t count on Lesnar or St-Pierre ever returning; the former is facing a suspension for a failed drug test, and the latter’s reasonable concerns about his contract might prove to be too much for the UFC. Rousey’s return is uncertain. Lawler is 34 years old, a veteran of 39 professional fights and nearly 15 years in the sport, and he still has never been a fixture outside hardcore circles.
While Jones has been a reliable, if unspectacular, draw, only his feuds with Rashad Evans and Daniel Cormier have produced box-office fireworks. Bisping has real name value and some drawing power even on pay-per-view, but he’s 37 years old. Neither of the Diaz brothers are looking to fight three times per year, though it’s a safe bet they’ll produce big numbers when they choose to take a fight.
So who does that leave?
The rest of the conversation should begin with VanZant rather than Jedrzejczyk. Her time on Dancing with the Stars has made her, if not a household name, at least someone with substantially greater exposure than the Polish dynamo. Her highlight-reel knockout of Bec Rawlings on last month’s UFC on Fox show didn’t hurt, though that event did draw the lowest ratings in the history of the UFC’s relationship with Fox.
VanZant has the look the UFC is after. They made the call to get her on Dancing with the Stars and went out of their way to promote her. The UFC clearly believes it has something in her; do you agree, Steven? Even if she becomes a star, can she back it up in the Octagon?
Steven: Contrary to what Dana White says, VanZant doesn’t have the “it” factor. Not in the cage, where she will likely remain a fringe top-10 name for the indefinite future, and not out of the cage, where she lacks any sort of personality.
Whether you like Rousey or not, she’s the complete package. In the cage, she’s an assassin that actually managed to consistently dispatch opponents in under a minute. Out of the cage, she has a distinct aura of confidence and intensity.
And really, VanZant’s run on Dancing with the Stars isn’t that big a deal. The ratings for UFC on Fox 21 would suggest that her lengthy run on DWTS didn’t improve her drawing power as a fighter, and it’s not like there’s any precedent of people achieving lasting celebrity through these season-long game shows.
In six months, nobody will remember who won the show, never even mind who came in second. At that point, VanZant will just be the ninth-best fighter in one of the UFC’s non-revenue-generating weight classes.
VanZant hasn’t really shown anything beyond the fact that she’s pretty and an above-average 115-pound fighter. Unless she has some great cards in her hand and has an amazing poker face, I just don’t see her breaking through into the mainstream, either as a competitor or celebrity.
The UFC has done a good enough job turning her into a strong Fight Night main event, but they’re going to have to look elsewhere if they want to find the next big thing.
Patrick: I don’t disagree that VanZant’s ceiling as a fighter probably falls below the very cream of the division, though it’s massively premature to write off an athletic 22-year-old who has all of nine fights to her name. I don’t disagree that she lacks raw charisma, either.
You’re flat-out wrong that nobody will remember VanZant was on DWTS, though. Twelve million people, more than have ever seen a UFC on Fox card, watched the finale of her season. That’s a level of exposure that doesn’t go away.
You don’t explode into mass fame overnight. It may be hard to remember now, but Rousey had four fights in the UFC over the course of two years, along with reality show and movie appearances, before she became a household name.
You build audience familiarity over time, with one appearance on Today or Good Morning America or Access Hollywood leading into the next over a period of years. Eventually, you hit a tipping point.
VanZant has had one fight, on a minor card in an out-of-the-way market that was preempted for NFL preseason games, since she competed on DWTS. Give it some time.
Still, there’s no disputing that she’s not yet an elite fighter, and yet the UFC has chosen to give her a big-time push. The contrast between her and the ultra-talented champion in her division, Jedrzejczyk, couldn’t be clearer. The UFC hasn’t pushed Jedrzejczyk with anything like that intensity.
This gets at the fundamental tension in what the UFC is doing with fighters like VanZant, and it’s why she dominates this discussion: She’s the prime example of the UFC pushing hand-picked competitors before they’ve really done much in the cage and without devoting as much attention to its most skilled and accomplished champions.
Can that tension be resolved, Steven? And what does it say about the UFC’s audience?
Steven: It can, to a degree, but a promotional push doesn’t count for anything outside the confines of the MMA sphere. Even then it isn’t a guarantee of popularity.
It’s worth remembering the fate of the UFC’s first pet project, Erick Silva. The Brazilian Bieber got a big push from the company, with preferential placement on cards and plenty of squash matches to keep him looking strong.
Even so, Silva never got over with fans outside Brazil, and was quickly forgotten in his home country. His next fight is on the Fight Night 95 prelims.
None of the UFC’s handpicked stars are immune from that same fate.
On the other hand, we’ve seen time and again that in-cage success is no guarantee of booming buyrates. Neither is having exciting fights. Neither is being champion.
The trick to UFC stardom is to both have in-cage success and resonate with an underrepresented demographic. Rousey exploded in large part due to the simple fact that she caught the eye of women that hadn’t previously looked at MMA. There was a buzz for McGregor among Irish fans before he even entered the UFC, which exploded after he beat Marcus Brimage in his debut.
So what demographics has the UFC not tapped into yet? Luke Thomas recently stated on The MMA Beat that the UFC hasn’t done a brilliant job of attracting African-Americans. The UFC is still courting Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, though the promotion is having trouble cultivating talent beyond former champ Cain Velasquez.
I’m not sure who, exactly, the UFC’s next breakout star will be, but I think it will be whoever manages to warm up those communities to MMA.
Patrick: This is the great paradox of the UFC’s last year: What draws eyeballs has become increasingly disconnected from the title picture.
As recently as 2013, the UFC’s four highest-drawing cards featured St-Pierre or Anderson Silva in title bouts. In 2016, a pair of fights featuring the featherweight champion against a lightweight contender inexplicably contested at 170 pounds have done the biggest numbers.
UFC 200, the third-biggest card of the year, featured a women’s bantamweight title fight and an interim featherweight title fight—but much of its box office success had to do with the return of Lesnar, a professional wrestler who hadn’t fought in nearly five years.
Outside of McGregor at featherweight, where the Irishman is unlikely to fight again, and Demetrious Johnson at flyweight, where the fans don’t really seem to care, not a single division’s biggest draw currently holds the title.
Maybe that will change in the future, and the UFC can again push its best fighters as marketable attractions. But it seems more likely that the best fighters and the ones who draw the most eyeballs will continue to diverge.
What this drives home is how rare the combination of talent and marketability actually is.
There are plenty of talented fighters on the UFC’s roster. You can make a star, someone who has the right look, with enough exposure.
But you can’t fake talent, and not everyone is cut out to be in the public eye all the time. Finding a truly elite fighter who can handle the demands of constant media exposure while actually offering something to a mass audience is the rarest thing in combat sports, and the UFC is lucky to have found even one in the form of Conor McGregor.
Let’s make a couple of picks. Who can fulfill all those requirements? I’m going to say Yair Rodriguez (the winner of The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America), Jedrzejczyk, brick-fisted bantamweight contender Cody Garbrandt, and if everything breaks right, CM Punk-slayer Mickey Gall.
Steven: I think Tyron Woodley is making the right moves to break through to the next level. He’s got the belt, he has fans caring about his next fight (for better or worse) and he’s actually getting the ball rolling in Hollywood.
In my opinion, the only question there is whether or not the UFC’s going to be smart enough to take him and run to the bank, or if they’ll do their usual routine of lashing out at fighters that don’t bend to their promotional plans.
Patrick: Woodley has accomplished that rarest of tasks: making fans care about him, one way or another. Hopefully it leads to big paydays for him, and sets a blueprint that other new champions can follow in the future.
The diversity of potential answers, though, showcases just how hard it is to find a breakout star. There’s no sure thing waiting in the wings, no obvious next mainstream celebrity. It takes time, winning streaks and natural charisma, and we may go years before another bright light emerges.
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