Last week, former UFC middleweight champion Luke Rockhold made headlines when he called out former heavyweight champion Fabricio Werdum. The two men have had issues for years, going back to when they both fought under the Strikeforce banner. In the absence of a meaningful hierarchy of challengers in the middleweight division, Rockhold said, he might as well fight Werdum in the meantime.
“They’re [the UFC] into making money fights, right?” said Rockhold on UFC Tonight. “They want to make a money fight, sell some tickets? Let’s do this thing.”
One can argue whether the trend toward big-name fighters meeting in sometimes odd matchups is new or not in the WME-IMG era, or the current state of affairs is best understood as the continuation of the trend of the last year of the Zuffa era, which saw the return of Brock Lesnar and two bouts between Nate Diaz and Conor McGregor.
What isn’t arguable is that fighters’ awareness of and willingness to seek out these kinds of bouts are absolutely on the upswing.
Whether it’s Rockhold pitching a fight with Werdum or Tyron Woodley seeking out matchups with Nick Diaz or Michael Bisping, rumors of wild pairings are constantly in the news. They’re a continual facet of following the sport now, and not an occasional deviation (Randy Couture vs. James Toney, for example) from the baseline norms of the UFC’s matchmaking.
The UFC should fully embrace bouts like Rockhold vs. Werdum in this new and exciting age. There’s no point in pining for a lost age of meritocracy in the UFC that never fully existed anyway, and if the UFC’s goal is to make as much money as possible in the short term, then it needs to find creative ways of using the various pieces at their disposal.
Let’s break this down.
In terms of pay-per-view sales, this is an increasingly star-driven age. Fans buy the biggest names in enormous quantities, meaning McGregor and Ronda Rousey (and before them Georges St-Pierre and Anderson Silva). The middle class of pay-per-view draws formerly occupied by fighters like BJ Penn, Rampage Jackson and a whole host of other big-name former champions has essentially disappeared.
In the absence of a star like McGregor or Rousey, the UFC will occasionally be content with cards that draw low numbers, like the paltry 150,000 that Anthony Pettis vs. Max Holloway drew at UFC 206.
Alternatively, the promotion can attempt to stack the card with a variety of meaningful bouts in the hope that quantity will entice fans to pay full price. That worked well for UFC 200, which drew 1.1 million buys on the strength of Brock Lesnar, Miesha Tate and Jose Aldo.
Throwing a couple of champions on a card and hoping the aggregate effect will draw fans in isn’t a bad option, and it’s probably the best use of the belts for extremely talented and accomplished but not big-name fighters.
This is what the UFC is trying with UFC 211 in Dallas, which features Stipe Miocic vs. Junior dos Santos for the heavyweight belt and a strawweight title fight between Joanna Jedrzejczyk and Jessica Andrade. It was the original plan for UFC 201, though Demetrious Johnson withdrew, and it worked at UFC 199, which featured Rockhold vs. Bisping for the middleweight strap and the trilogy fight between Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber.
Champions are a commodity the UFC can use in a variety of ways; stacking cards with generic title fights is one, and matching them up with each other—McGregor vs. Alvarez and St-Pierre vs. Bisping both qualify in this regard—is another, though a bit dicier and harder to pull off.
Beyond the champions, however, the UFC has a wide array of fighters under contract who have some measure of name value. These are often former champions, fighters like the aforementioned Rockhold and Werdum. In the current star-driven landscape, that’s not enough name value to drive huge TV ratings or enormous pay-per-view buys, but that doesn’t mean they have no value.
If there’s a market inefficiency, someplace where the UFC can make more creative money fights in the WME-IMG era with the resources at its disposal, it’s through the clever use of these kinds of fighters.
There’s precedent for this. The UFC put together Nick Diaz and Anderson Silva, both somewhat faded but still with substantial followings, back in January 2015; the event was a surprise success, drawing 650,000 buys. On their own, neither Diaz nor Silva would have drawn that much as a pay-per-view headliner at that point; both fighters had lost two straight, Silva had suffered a devastating injury and neither had fought recently.
Pitting the two against each other made the matchup more than the sum of its parts, and did so without disrupting a title picture or taking away pieces that might have been used in another fashion. Other examples of this dynamic include Daniel Cormier vs. Silva, a fight that came up on very short notice, and the Fight Night headlining bout of Frankie Edgar vs. Urijah Faber.
So let’s put our money where our mouth is and consider a few of these options. Cruz is capable of winning back his bantamweight title, but if the timing works out after Edgar’s upcoming bout with Yair Rodriguez, why not match the two of them up? That might not be a pay-per-view killer, but it could be a strong co-main event to a big-time card or a headliner on Fox.
The next two months have both light heavyweight and heavyweight title fights booked. Why not match up the losers of those two fights? The size disparity isn’t huge. If Stipe Miocic loses to Junior dos Santos, he’ll have two losses to the champion; ditto for Anthony Johnson with Cormier. Miocic would be a long way from another title shot, and Cormier could find himself playing second fiddle to a returning Jon Jones.
If Aldo loses his featherweight belt to Max Holloway in June at UFC 212, this might be the right time to finally make that long-lost fight with Pettis, one that was scheduled and then canceled back in 2013. A violence special between former welterweight champion Robbie Lawler and Donald Cerrone would be a nice touch.
Rockhold vs. Werdum might prove to be a bit too wild for the UFC’s tastes, but surely there are more productive uses for these former champions than slotting them back into matchups within their respective divisional hierarchies.
Things are changing in the UFC; the question is one of degree, not whether those changes are in fact happening. Those changes don’t have to be bad, though, and putting together big-name fighters in fun matchups serves the needs of both a UFC that is desperately trying to generate money fights and fans who would like to see fun, creative matchups.
This is a way of doing both.
All pay-per-view figures drawn from MMA Payout, which collects numbers from Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter.
Patrick Wyman is the Senior MMA Analyst for Bleacher Report and the co-host of the Heavy Hands Podcast, your source for the finer points of face-punching. For the history enthusiasts out there, he also hosts The Fall of Rome Podcast on the end of the Roman Empire. He can be found on Twitter and on Facebook.
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