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Welcome to our newest Friday feature here at Caged In: A single, solitary look back at the five biggest news stories of the last five days. We’ll put a bow on the work week and, for the most part, lead you into fight night more knowledgeable than you w…
Welcome to our newest Friday feature here at Caged In: A single, solitary look back at the five biggest news stories of the last five days. We’ll put a bow on the work week and, for the most part, lead you into fight night more knowledgeable than you were when you crashed into your bed on Thursday night.
Welcome to the Friday Five.
If you’ve been hiding under a rock on this fine Thursday morning, you likely missed this news (which I received via email bright and early this morning):
WHAT: Media Conference Call hosted by Spike TV to announce major talent deal involving Bellator Fi…
If you’ve been hiding under a rock on this fine Thursday morning, you likely missed this news (which I received via email bright and early this morning):
WHAT: Media Conference Call hosted by Spike TV to announce major talent deal involving Bellator Fighting Championships and TNA Wrestling
WHO: Kevin Kay, President Spike TV
Bjorn Rebney, Chairman and CEO, Bellator Fighting Championships
Dixie Carter, President, TNA EntertainmentWHEN: Thursday, May 10 at 2:00 p.m. ET/11:00 a.m. PT
What could Bellator and TNA Wrestling—both of whom are owned by media giant Viacom—possibly be announcing during a joint conference call?
No, we’re not going to find out that Kurt Angle has finally, for real this time, decided to try his hand at mixed martial arts after five years of coming up with amazing excuses as to why he couldn’t actually do it.
The story is this: Muhammad “King Mo” Lawal has signed a dual contract with Bellator and TNA.
Lawal’s deal with Viacom was actually signed three weeks ago, but Zuffa retained matching rights to any new contract offers Lawal received despite firing him.
What does this news mean? How does it impact mixed martial artists going forward?
In truth, this deal won’t have much of a lasting impact on MMA. The number of legitimate mixed martial artists who want to try their hand at pro wrestling is very small. Lawal was a huge fan of professional wrestling growing up and always wanted to try his hand at the pseudo-sport, but there was never any chance of that happening while under contract to Zuffa.
With Bellator, things are different. They’re both under the same corporate umbrella, which means there’s an opportunity for cross-promotion. The UFC was also under that same corporate umbrella, at least in terms of television deals, but Dana White makes it a personal point not to have his product confused with pro wrestling.
Bjorn Rebney has no such qualms. In fact, I’d say that he’s welcoming those confusions, at least judging from this news. It’s a smart move for Bellator. They need all the exposure they can get, and if TNA and their meager 1.2-1.6 million viewers each week can help them get the eyeballs they need, then more power to them.
Lawal cannot fight until the fall due to his drug failure suspension from earlier this year, so expect to see plenty of him in a pro-wrestling ring this summer.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com
The UFC’s steeply declining ratings for their FOX network specials have been one of the hottest topics going this week. The first FOX show in November, featuring a heavyweight title fight between Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos, did 5.6 milli…
The UFC’s steeply declining ratings for their FOX network specials have been one of the hottest topics going this week.
The first FOX show in November, featuring a heavyweight title fight between Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos, did 5.6 million viewers according to Nielsen ratings. The show was heavily promoted during all FOX broadcasts, including National Football League and Major League Baseball games.
The second show in January, featuring a light heavyweight contender bout between Rashad Evans and Phil Davis, did 4.6 million viewers. There was less promotion for the event during sports broadcasts on the network, but advertising was still visible.
Last Saturday’s show with Nate Diaz and Jim Miller did just 2.4 million viewers. It still scored well in the highly coveted 18-49 male demographic but finished dead last against other programing in its time slot. It was also one of the least-watched MMA broadcasts in network television history.
It seems like a cause for alarm. And perhaps it is. There’s no real way to spin the numbers into a positive angle, so I won’t even try. But UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta says he’s not worried by the sharp decline in numbers, especially given the competition they were up against on Saturday night:
“If The Avengers did [a box office of] over $200 million for the weekend, unfortunately for us, there were a great number of our potential viewers sitting in a movie theater somewhere,” he said. “Or, they were out that night celebrating Cinco de Mayo. Listen, I’m not trying to make excuses. Hats off to HBO and Bernard Hopkins. That’s a great job and a great number they pulled. But when you say, ‘Are we concerned,’ I’d say no. We’re excited.
“We had a situation where 2.5 million people, which I would say is still a substantial number, got to see what I would say was a tremendous product. All four fights were great fights and in the main event, Nate Diaz showed he’s potentially a breakout star who down the road could move the needle for us on pay-per-view. The playbook is playing out for us exactly the way we wanted it to.”
Fertitta is right in noting that the UFC was going up against big competition last Saturday. But there are still lessons to be learned from the declining FOX ratings.
1. Stars are still the thing that draw casual viewers: I was just as excited as the next hardcore fan for the fight between Jim Miller and Nathan Diaz. I think I was equally as excited for the rest of the fights on the card, too. All of them were intriguing and must-sees for me.
But I don’t represent the casual audience. Not by a long shot. I’ll watch any fights I can get my hands on, and there are a lot of you out there who feel the same way. But we represent a small slice of the potential viewing audience for MMA on network television.
In order to capture that audience, you must either headline a show with fighters that have name value or with something like the heavyweight title fight. It has to be a can’t-miss event, where you get folks talking around the proverbial (and literal) water cooler in the days leading up to fight night. That’s why the Dos Santos/Velasquez fight worked so well; it was hyped as one of the biggest fights in the history of the sport. It didn’t play out that way, but it didn’t matter—by that point, the audience had already tuned in.
A lot of you will groan at this suggestion, but taking someone like Tito Ortiz and placing him in the headlining bout on FOX is the ideal situation. You don’t want to cannibalize your PPV’s—where you get the majority of your income—by headlining every network event with a title fight featuring huge stars. But putting someone like Ortiz or Forrest Griffin in that situation is just about perfect. Neither of them will be headlining a UFC pay-per-view any time soon, but both of them have the name value to draw in fans.
Once you’ve attracted that audience, you can expose them to younger fighters you want to build into stars by having them fight on the undercard.
2. Advertising is key: As I mentioned above, there was very little advertising to be found for UFC on FOX 3. The previous shows were highlighted multiple times during major NFL games; I don’t think I saw a single commercial for Nate Diaz vs. Jim Miller running during FOX television shows in the weeks leading up to the fight.
Part of that can be blamed on the season. There aren’t any NFL games on FOX that can be used as a vehicle to promote your fights, and baseball is relegated to the weekends. But you still have to push the shows heavily on your network.
Find the sitcoms or long-form, hourly shows that do your best ratings among a wide demographic. Use those shows to push that you’ve got a chance to see some of the brightest young stars in the sport competing for free on Saturday night. It won’t be as effective as running ads during NFL games, but it’s better than nothing.
This rating wasn’t the end of the world for the UFC, but changes do need to be made.
The fourth FOX show in August is scheduled to be headlined by the debuting Hector Lombard vs. Brian Stann. Now that we’ve seen the rating for the Diaz/Miller fight, I believe that to be a mistake.
The UFC wants to push Brian Stann as a mainstream star, and FOX is a great vehicle for doing that. And I believe Stann has the potential to be one of the UFC’s most marketable stars. But he’s not on that level yet, and people won’t tune in to see Stann taking on a fighter that nobody outside of the hardcore fan community has heard of.
In an ideal world, I would take the Ortiz/Griffin fight that’s scheduled for UFC 148 and move it to the headlining slot at UFC on FOX 4. Losing the fight won’t lessen the impact of UFC 148 one bit; that card has two title fights, and one of them—the rematch between Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen—is one of the most anticipated fights in UFC history.
I’m looking forward to seeing Ortiz and Griffin a third time, but I’d be willing to bet that few fans are buying the PPV just to see that fight. Take it, move it to the main event on FOX and highlight Stann vs. Lombard as the co-main event.
As I said, Saturday’s rating is not the end of the world. But it does need to be an eye-opener if the UFC wants to have a long and successful partnership with FOX.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com
Last week’s suicide of famed football star Junior Seau brought the topic of the long-term effects of concussions back to the forefront of the sporting world.In truth, it’s a discussion that hasn’t gone away over the past few years, and rightly so. The …
Last week’s suicide of famed football star Junior Seau brought the topic of the long-term effects of concussions back to the forefront of the sporting world.
In truth, it’s a discussion that hasn’t gone away over the past few years, and rightly so. The February 2011 suicide of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, and the medical confirmation that Duerson suffered from a neurodegenerative disease linked to concussions at the time of his death, was one of the first major NFL cases to unfold in the public eye.
And hundreds of former NFL players (including names such as Jim McMahon, Dorsey Levens and Jamal Turner) have filed suit against the league, claiming that the NFL deliberately withheld information regarding concussions that was critical to player safety.
Research into CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) has made plenty of headway in recent years, but it will be a battle fought well into the future. Fans of the National Football League hate to see the game they love changed at a fundamental level, and yet those changes seemingly must be made in order to protect the long-term futures of the players we tune in to see each Sunday afternoon. We’re already seeing plenty of calls for the NFL to take more action in protecting its players.
And what about mixed martial arts? We’ve yet to see any high-profile CTE cases emerge from the sport. But given the violence inherent in professional cagefighting, it seems highly unlikely that we’ll go another 10 years without some kind of concussion-related tragedy occurring.
With that in mind, should we start taking steps to prevent these kinds of things from happening down the road? Dr. Johnny Benjamin, the medical columnist for MMAjunkie.com, says we should. He proposes that fighters such as Pat Barry, who suffered his second knockout loss in under a year, should take a year off from fighting in order to let his brain heal:
The year off would provide an opportunity for his brain to heal without the continued insult of smaller (sub-concussive) blows that are a routine part of MMA training. Highlight-reel KTFOs and “Knock Out of the Night” performances get most of the attention for obvious reasons, but if you only focus on these events, you’re missing the real story.
One of the things that we are learning in concussion management is that all of those routine head knocks that no one ever thinks about actually accumulate over time and are very, very important. The brain has an “injury meter,” and every time it takes a significant jolt, the needle rises.
Current thinking is that there is a continuum based on accumulated force directed at the brain. At some point (currently poorly defined) symptoms occur (concussion), and as the accumulation of force grows, temporary (MTBI-minimally traumatic brain injury) then permanent damage (CTE-chronic traumatic encephalopathy) occurs.
I strongly support this idea, and I think it’s something that needs to be looked at by the various athletic commissions that sanction the sport. I’m not a doctor (I was a medic in the Army, but that’s hardly the same thing), but logic dictates that taking time off to heal an injured brain is a good thing to do. In a perfect world, fighters who suffer two knockouts in under 12 months should be forced to sit on the sidelines for a year.
Forcing a fighter out of action for a year or more seems like an impossible thing to enforce. Yes, it hampers their ability to make a living. Most professional fighters aren’t making money if they aren’t fighting. There are guys who get a monthly paycheck from a sponsor even if they aren’t fighting, much like an employee of a regular company would.
But those cases are not the norm in mixed martial arts. Still, I consider long-term health and living a more important factor than current monetary status.
The UFC could help. They could issue monthly paychecks to fighters who are suspended for knockouts while keeping those fighters involved in promotional events for the company. Barry is a perfect example of a guy who could go out and do other things for the company while also giving his brain time to heal.
As we’ve seen in the NFL, there is no easy solution to this problem. And as I said above, it hasn’t even developed into a problem in mixed martial arts. Not yet.
But I’d rather look into solutions for the problem now than look back 10 years from now and wish we’d paid attention.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com
Lots of people are looking forward to Hector Lombard’s UFC debut. I’m one of them. I’ve always been a sucker for seeing guys from another promotion debut for their competitors. I think this desire, at least on a personal level for me, can be trace…
Lots of people are looking forward to Hector Lombard‘s UFC debut. I’m one of them.
I’ve always been a sucker for seeing guys from another promotion debut for their competitors. I think this desire, at least on a personal level for me, can be traced back to my old days of hardcore pro wrestling fandom.
Some of the most visceral memories of my childhood involve seeing Ric Flair appear on World Wrestling Federation television for the first time, or that guy “Mean” Mark Callus suddenly growing a fetish for dead people and appearing as The Undertaker.
But that’s not the only thing that interests me about Lombard’s UFC debut. This is a man riding a 25-fight winning streak, and he’s finally appearing in the biggest promotion on the planet. We never got to see Fedor Emelianenko debut in the UFC during the height of his winning streak—the subtly brilliant minds at M-1 Global were responsible for that.
And while Lombard is not Emelianenko—though I’d probably give Hector the advantage if the two were to fight in 2012—his winning streak and vicious style is enough to make his UFC debut a highly-anticipated moment for me and others just like me.
Lombard nearly killed that interest dead during an appearance on Tuesday’s edition of UFC Tonight.
Look, I’m not saying that every single guy doing an interview needs to be Chael P. Sonnen. That’s impossible, and the sport would be hard to handle if everyone out there did an over-the-top Billy Graham impersonation. It’d be too much.
But Lombard was being interviewed about the biggest fight of his career. He’d finally made it to the big stage and was being featured on one of the UFC’s shows that caters to the hardcore segment of their audience. The least he could’ve done was show a little enthusiasm.
Instead, we got a version of Lombard that looked completely uninterested in what was going on and sounded like he was about to fall asleep. The evidence is in the video above. See for yourself.
Not every fight needs over-the-top promotion or a hype job. But at the rate Lombard is going, he’ll actively turn away viewers who might actually be interested in seeing what he can do against Brian Stann. That’s not what the UFC needs for its fourth FOX outing, and that’s not what Lombard needs if he wants to gain new fans.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com
I watched UFC on FOX 3 last Saturday in a bar. More specifically, I watched the card in the bar at Buffalo Wild Wings. This is not an uncommon practice. Back when I lived in Vegas, John Morgan from MMAjunkie.com and I would spend hours at the loca…
I watched UFC on FOX 3 last Saturday in a bar. More specifically, I watched the card in the bar at Buffalo Wild Wings.
This is not an uncommon practice. Back when I lived in Vegas, John Morgan from MMAjunkie.com and I would spend hours at the local Buffalo Wild Wings. You know the show Cheers? BW3 was our Cheers. I’m not kidding—not even a little bit—when I tell you that we spent a good portion of last Christmas at Buffalo Wild Wings.
I’ve gotten pretty good at watching fights at BW3, even when they refuse to turn the sound on. Or when the bartenders don’t even know there is a UFC show scheduled that night, much less a UFC show on free television. That’s what happened this time around, but we finally got the television tuned to FOX just in time to see the ref call for Lavar Johnson and Pat Barry to trade heavy, leathery fists.
I say all of this, I guess, to say this: I didn’t watch the Josh Koscheck vs. Johny Hendricks fight as closely as I usually do. It just wasn’t possible. I didn’t see every single solitary second of the fight, and I didn’t have my trusty pen and paper to take minute-by-minute notes.
But after watching the conclusion of the third round, I was certain Koscheck had won a close 29-28 decision, mostly because that’s how I scored the fight. I thought Josh might even get a 30-27 score here or there, if there were any judges sitting cageside that didn’t know what they were watching.
So you can imagine my bewilderment when Hendricks was awarded the win.
Now, I’ve gone back and watched the fight since Saturday night’s wing-and-beer festival ended. And I still find myself coming to the same conclusion: Koscheck won the first and third rounds with more effective striking, and the official numbers from FightMetric—the official supplier of statistics for the UFC—back me up.
In the first round, Hendricks landed 18 significant strikes out of 25 overall landed strikes. Koscheck landed 14 overall strikes, but all were significant. And 16 of Hendricks’ strikes were leg kicks, while 11 of Koscheck’s strikes were to the head.
Now, I’m not a guy who says leg kicks aren’t worth anything. They obviously are. But it was also obvious that Koscheck landed the more valuable strikes in the first round, and judge Ricardo Almeida—the only former professional fighter on the panel—agreed with me.
Hendricks dominated the second round. There’s no question about that one. And the third round was close enough that it could’ve gone either way. I’m not here to say this was a blowout by Koscheck, but I do believe he did enough with his strikes to the body and his clinch work in the third round to earn the decision.
This was an interesting fight. With Carlos Condit on the sidelines, waiting for Georges St-Pierre to return in November, Hendricks will have a long time to sit and wait for his promised title shot. Why would Hendricks sit for what will likely be a year or more in the prime of his career? That doesn’t make sense.
I’ll let Koscheck propose a different idea:
Just watched the fight again.1&3rd round where mine. Maybe a rematch 5 round fight this time? What U say Hindricks?
— Josh Koscheck (@JoshKoscheck) May 8, 2012
I like it. Let’s make it happen, UFC.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com