The coolest thing about next weekend’s UFC on FOX event is that it features a legitimate world UFC title fight in the main event of a network-televised free card.
The idea behind that is that you put champions who can’t really pull a number on pay per view in front of your largest-possible audience—and that’s exactly what Fox represents—and hope they put on a stunning performance so that, when they are moved back to pay per view, they can pull bigger numbers after they’ve been exposed to a national viewing audience.
That’s the theory, anyway. The jury is out on whether or not it works. Demetrious Johnson was given maximum exposure as the headliner of three Fox events; when he was moved back to a headlining role on pay per view, the event (UFC 174) reportedly drew an estimated 115,000 buys, among the lowest in the history of the UFC.
And he’s headlining September’s UFC 191 card in Vegas, and let me tell you right now that there just isn’t much anticipation for that one. Not from any corner.
Still, that’s the idea behind putting T.J. Dillashaw and Renan Barao on free television.
It’s a rematch that the UFC is selling as “the one we’ve all been waiting for,” when in reality I don’t think any single person on planet Earth—outside of Barao, his camp and his friends—have been clamoring to see it. That’s because rematches, by their very nature, are best used one of three scenarios:
- Two fighters have a very close fight.
- A fighter scores a total crap decision win over the rightful winner
- A former champion/challenger loses and then works his way back into title contention.
None of these three options can be applied to Dillashaw vs. Barao 2.
The first bout wasn’t even remotely close. To say that Dillashaw kicked the stuffing out of Barao and then stole his soul might be something of an understatement. And it wasn’t even a decision at all; Dillashaw finished him in the fifth round. There was little doubt who was the better fighter.
But in beating Barao, Dillashaw upset the apple cart. The UFC had spent generously to promote Barao, and constantly trotted out a red-faced, spittle-spewing Dana White to scream about how Barao was the best pound for pound fighter in the world. (This despite the fact that Jon Jones was still right there on their roster.)
And then Dillashaw utterly wasted Barao, and all that money went up in smoke. So the UFC, sensing a chance to recoup their losses, immediately booked a rematch between the two, and told us that we’d been waiting to see the rematch!
We hadn’t been waiting, of course. Because again, the first fight was absolutely definitive. Joe Rogan, standing in the middle of the Octagon, called Dillashaw’s performance the greatest he’d ever seen in the UFC. That’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to lead into an immediate rematch.
But it was booked for UFC 177 anyway, and then Barao—being the total professional he is—had what we’ll nicely call a “weight cutting incident” during fight week. He was hospitalized and yanked from the fight, replaced by Joe Soto. He returned a few months later to beat Mitch Gagnon by submission, and the UFC once again had their excuse to put him back in a title fight with Dillashaw.
And so here we are once again, faced with a rematch that’s sold to us as one of the most anticipated in UFC history. And that’s just a load of crap, because it is not the most anticipated rematch in UFC history. I’d even say that it’s not anticipated at all. It’s a rematch of a fight that the UFC couldn’t wait to make because they invested a lot of money in the former champion. And they put it on free TV because I think they knew it wouldn’t be something people were willing to pay for.
But this will work out in Dillashaw’s favor. If he goes out on Fox television and dominates Barao, then puts him away like he did the first time? That’s good for him. That’s good for his eventual move back to pay per view. That makes him an interesting attraction that people will begin paying to see, because he has a unique and exciting style and he finishes fights.
And it moves him ever closer to an eventual big-time fight with former champion Dominick Cruz, which will likely be the biggest 135 pound title fight ever.
But first, Dillashaw needs to get through Barao. Given what we saw the first time around, it isn’t difficult to imagine him doing just that.
And after that, perhaps we can move on from this forced Barao thing to something a little more interesting.
Jeremy Botter covers mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter.
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