While most fans are still trying to understand the new main event at UFC 153, fans of Jose Aldo and Frankie Edgar can now relax knowing the “superfight” will still take place sometime down the road.MMAJunkie.com reported Thursday night that Dana White …
While most fans are still trying to understand the new main event at UFC 153, fans of Jose Aldo and Frankie Edgar can now relax knowing the “superfight” will still take place sometime down the road.
MMAJunkie.com reported Thursday night that Dana White has confirmed that when Jose Aldo heals from a foot infection he suffered following his motorcycle accident, he’ll be matched with former lightweight champion Frankie Edgar.
The fight was originally booked for the main event at UFC 153 in Rio after Aldo’s original opponent Erik Koch went down with injury. Edgar stepped in on short notice just after he announced his intentions to drop down to the featherweight division.
Dana White said, “Camp costs money. These things aren’t free. You don’t just go to the gym and everything is free. He’s got to put some time and effort into it, start calling in sparring partners and trying to find people. He was well into that when Aldo got hurt, so we’re going to give it to him.”
Edgar is coming off back-to-back losses at the hands of lightweight champion Benson Henderson, and honestly, I’m not sure if he deserves an immediate title shot, but after that quote from White, it’s clear now that Edgar is being rewarded for stepping up to take the fight on short notice.
It’s not clear what the timetable is for Aldo to return, although White did say that he hopes the fight can be made by the end of the year.
The UFC is the envy of the combat sports world. Few, if any, companies have ever managed to monetize their audience quite the way the UFC has. When the promotion is at the top of its game, no one is better at convincing a fan to part with $55.In recent…
In recent months, the UFC has been put to the test. Injuries have nearly crippled the company, dashing many of matchmaker Joe Silva’s carefully laid plans. For months, every UFC PPV has been little more than damage control, with Silva and UFC President Dana White making the best of bad situations.
The latest example is UFC 153, scheduled for October 12 in Brazil. The main event has seen Erik Koch give way to Frankie Edgar after an injury, only to see champion Jose Aldo forced to drop from the fight after a motorcycle injury.
Middleweight champion Anderson Silva, no doubt wearing a white hat, has come to save the day, filling in for Aldo in the main event. His opponent? Journeyman Stephan Bonnar.
Some fans, especially those with a sports fan’s mentality, assume this is a huge step down. And as an athletic contest, it is. Edgar was the long-time lightweight champion, Aldo the kingpin at 145 pounds. The talent in the cage would have been mind blowing.
Others, those who like to analyze the UFC as a business, assume that Silva-Bonnar is actually a huge upgrade for the promotion. Silva, after all, is a major star. He and Chael Sonnen recently broke the million-buy mark for a PPV title fight. Surely that magic will rub off on UFC 153, too.
History, however, has taught us both of our fictional straw fans are wrong. Silva, on his own, has never been a huge draw.
Aldo and Edgar, despite their vast array of skills, are box office poison.
So, how will UFC 153 perform? It’s nearly impossible to predict a PPV’s financial success with any accuracy. But we do have an idea about what has worked in the past. The UFC has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams with two easy formulas: star power and good, old fashioned hate.
If you look at the UFC’s most successful PPV events, one or the other is represented.Usually it takes both.
The stars, men who drew well every time out, are actually few and far between. There are five who really stand out over the course of UFC history—Ken Shamrock, Brock Lesnar, Georges St-Pierre and Tito Ortiz.
Others, like Anderson Silva and Quinton Jackson, are situational stars. In the right position, with the right opponent, they can have a major impact. But against opponents fans don’t believe in, their box office powers fade.
For example, Jackson was a bust against Matt Hamill and Keith Jardine. And Silva failed to draw against Yushin Okami, Patrick Cote and Dan Henderson. His fight with Bonnar will likely fall into this same category—if betting odds are any indication, fans don’t believe in Bonnar’s chances. That will be reflected when it comes time to count coppers.
The other tool the UFC leverages well is the grudge match. When the promotion is capable of convincing fans that two fighters really hate each other, the result is box office gold. Even the biggest stars shine the brightest when the venom and trash talk start flowing.
Rampage had his greatest success against Rashad Evans. Ortiz against both Liddell and Shamrock. Lesnar made the most money against Frank Mir. Silva became a star thanks to his feud with Chael Sonnen.
Fans respond best to fights with the highest stakes. Those aren’t always title fights. Sometimes personal pride is more important than any title belt. But with the exception of Shamrock, who remained compelling to fans long after he was competitive in the cage, success is the ultimate box office aphrodisiac.
Simply put, fans won’t support a loser. Even the biggest stars, guys who drew big when they were winning regularly, couldn’t maintain their box office power when fans stopped believing in them.
A good example is Forrest Griffin. When Griffin beat Rampage Jackson for the UFC title, fans rejoiced. They wanted to love Forrest, who was a funny guy and a game fighter. When allowed to believe in him, they embraced him with open arms.
His next bout, against Evans, put up a million buys (with a super strong card underneath). But Griffin lost badly, then looked even worse against Silva at UFC 101 where they were the main event in all but name. That show drew 850,000 buys (data estimates via MMA Payout).
Griffin’s box office power was never the same. Fans simply couldn’t believe in him after that. His next PPV bout only managed to attract 375,000 viewers and he was shifted into a supporting role. No one wants to pay to cheer for a loser, no matter how lovable.
Even Liddell and Lesnar, the biggest of big dogs, saw their appeal fade when the losses piled up. Ortiz faded into a non-entity as well.
That brings us back to Silva and Bonnar. Silva is still one of the sport’s biggest stars. He has never lost a UFC fight. But he’s still the kind of star that needs a dance partner. We saw with Yushin Okami, even after it seemed he had turned the corner with huge money fights against Sonnen and Vitor Belfort, that Silva can’t do it on his own.
Bonnar is a beloved elder statesman, a fighter who has meant a lot to the UFC. But he has no PPV track record because he’s never been able to earn a spot at the top of the card. Fans know this. And I don’t believe they will buy this as a legitimate fight.
It’s a fight that has only one of the two ingredients the UFC needs to mix up a really powerful box office attraction. While it might improve marginally on what would have likely been an Edgar-Aldo dud, there will be no economic boom at UFC 153.
There’s a line in Christopher Nolan’s excellent film, The Dark Knight, where Lt. James Gordon is talking about Batman, who has just killed Harvey “Two Face” Dent and is running off to become Gotham’s invisible villain. Batman, as the story goes, is goi…
There’s a line in Christopher Nolan’s excellent film, The Dark Knight, where Lt. James Gordon is talking about Batman, who has just killed Harvey “Two Face” Dent and is running off to become Gotham’s invisible villain. Batman, as the story goes, is going to take the blame for Dent’s failings and become a hunted criminal, because he doesn’t think Gotham can handle the truth about Dent’s turn to the dark side and the horrible things he’s done.
Gordon’s young son asks him why Batman is running away.
“Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves,” Gordon says. “But not the one it needs right now.”
I know it may not make a lot of sense, but that line kind of sums up my feelings on the new UFC 153 main event announced on Wednesday between Anderson Silva and Stephan Bonnar.
Of course, we’re not speaking of caped heroes and crusaders in the night. And I’m not saying that Silva or Bonnar are Batman, though Silva is probably the closest thing we have to a mixed martial arts superhero. We’re talking about a fight, and it’s a fight that has received a ton of criticism since it was revealed.
Here’s the thing: I wanted to see Jose Aldo take on Frankie Edgar just as much as the next guy. It’s one of my dream fights, and I’m still holding out hope that we’ll see it eventually, providing Aldo can keep himself away from motorcycles while in the midst of training camp. It may not be as anticipated as, say, a fight between Georges St-Pierre and Silva, or Silva and Jon Jones, but it’s still one of those amazing fights that don’t come around very often.
But once Aldo deduced that he wasn’t able to fully recover from his motorcycle incident—and again, let’s keep UFC fighters away from motorcycles, just as a general rule—the options for UFC matchmaker Joe Silva, Dana White and the rest of the company were fairly slim. Sure, they had more notice than they were given when Dan Henderson pulled out of UFC 151 with just eight days notice, but putting together a big, pay-per-view main event headliner in a month remains a tricky business.
Once Aldo pulled out, and once Edgar decided he’d rather save himself for another day, we were faced with a UFC 153 main event featuring Jon Fitch and Erick Silva. Or perhaps Glover Teixeira and Fabio Maldonado, or even Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Dave Herman.
None of those sound like good main event options to me, but perhaps I’m alone in this line of thinking.
Putting together short-notice fights is a tricky and tough business. I’ve heard from plenty of fans over the past 24 hours via Twitter, and a lot of them suggested that the UFC was making a giant mistake in booking Silva vs. Bonnar.
“Why don’t they just put Alexander Gustafsson in the cage against Silva?” they said. “Why didn’t they run Shogun and Machida out for a third fight? Why couldn’t they pick anyone else besides Bonnar? Why not put ChaelSonnen in against Silva for a third time?”
The answers are pretty simple, really.
Gustafsson has been battling illness over the past month or so, and there’s no way he’d be ready in time for a competitive fight. Plus, he’s one of the hottest prospects in the light heavyweight division and a potential opponent for Jones in 2013. Why would you waste a contender by putting him in the cage against the best fighter in the world, especially when the best fighter in the world will be heading back down to his regular weight class after this fight?
And besides, UFC is intent on providing FOX with good fights for their next network television broadcast in December, and pulling Gustafsson from his bout with Rua isn’t a sound business decision. Which is why Rua wasn’t even called and offered this spot.
Machida? He’s demonstrated over the past few weeks that he’s not interested in fighting any time soon, and especially on short notice.
Sonnen just lost in emphatic fashion to Silva in July, so I can’t imagine a lot of UFC fans being all that interested in throwing down hard-earned dollars to see it again. Besides, Sonnen has a big fight with Forrest Griffin coming up in December. That fight could be the first step down a road that leads him to a huge money fight with Jones in 2013. Why risk it by putting him in the cage with the guy that just beat him for his light heavyweight debut?
Here’s what it boils down to: When it comes to booking short-notice fights like this one, there aren’t a lot of easy options. You can’t sacrifice your FOX shows or your big year-end pay-per-view in Las Vegas just because you need a main event for a Brazil show that is mostly being held to help build a foundation for the UFC brand in that country.
What better way to continue building that brand than by putting the best fighter in the world in the main event, especially since that fighter happens to be from Brazil? The Brazilians don’t care who Silva faces; he could walk in the cage to face James Irvin or Patrick Cote again, and they’d be happy.
And we, the people who do not live in Brazil, should also be happy. Because we’re getting a second chance to see Silva fight this year. That counts for something. Just two days ago, Silva was content to ride out the rest of the year and perhaps not step in the cage until the middle of next year, and we’d have to deal with it. Instead, we get another chance to see Silva work his beautiful and perfect art for the second time in four months. That’s a special thing.
What about Bonnar? I’m not going to sit here and tell you that he’s a fantastic fighter who deserves a crack at the best in the world. He’s riding a three-fight winning streak, but nobody’s going to confuse him with the top light heavyweights in the world.
But none of that matters to me. I love the story of Bonnar—the guy who participated in that legendary TUF 1 fight with Griffin but then went down a very different path—finally getting his shot at glory. Griffin became a superstar and one of the most popular mixed martial artists in the world, while Bonnar went on to become a kind of journeyman fighter, albeit one that has never left the UFC. He never attained the same heights as Griffin, mostly because he never could win the big fight.
But that could all change on October 13. Imagine the chaos if Bonnar somehow overcomes the odds and beats Silva? All of his failings and his inability to achieve the same kind of superstardom as Griffin would be instantly wiped out. Instead of being the guy who became Marty Jannety to Griffin’s Shawn Michaels, he’d forever be known as the guy who ended Anderson Silva’s winning streak.
Do I think Bonnar can achieve the impossible? It’s not likely. He’s a 13-to-1 underdog—the largest betting spread in UFC history—for a reason.
But I’m also not sleeping on his chances. He’s a tough fighter with a talent for sticking around in fights that turn more violent than usual. I don’t expect him to survive for all three rounds, but I also wouldn’t be shocked beyond belief if he’s somehow able to last and score a decision win. It’s unlikely, but not impossible.
I’m a sucker for good stories. The overlooked and nearly forgotten other half of the fight, the one that helped put the UFC on the map, getting one last shot at glory when it seemed like retirement was his only real option? I can dig that.
And all of this is saying nothing about the rest of the card. For as much vitriol as I’ve seen thrown UFC 153’s way in the last 24 hours, I think it’s one of the stronger cards, from top to bottom, that we’ve seen in quite some time. We get to see Demian Maia vs. Rick Story, Phil Davis vs. Wagner Prado, Erick Silva vs. Jon Fitch and the three fights I’ve already mentioned. That’s a good pay-per-view card, especially when you consider the booking acrobatics Silva and White had to execute in order to make it happen.
At the end of the day, I think I just realize that seeing Anderson Silva fight, no matter the opponent, is a special occasion. Sure, he says he’ll be fighting for another five or six years, but who knows if that’s even going to hold?
We don’t know how many more times we’ll get to see the greatest fighter in the history of the sport do his thing, and so we must consider any chance to see him in the cage a good opportunity. And if that chance turns out to be a virtual sparring session against Bonnar, well, that’s OK.
I’ll take what I can get. Silva vs. Bonnar may not be the fight we wanted, but it’s the fight we need all the same.
On a night that was suppose to feature Frankie Edgar making his UFC featherweight debut against champ Jose Aldo, Anderson Silva will be returning to light heavyweight to take on Stephan Bonner at UFC 153. An injury forced Aldo out of the event, an…
On a night that was suppose to feature Frankie Edgar making his UFC featherweight debut against champ Jose Aldo, Anderson Silva will be returning to light heavyweight to take on Stephan Bonner at UFC 153.
An injury forced Aldo out of the event, and Silva gladly stepped in to take a fight.
He will face The Ultimate Fighter 1 finalist Stephan Bonnar.
Three years after he defeated TUF 1 winner Forrest Griffin, Silva will now face the other man who was part one of the greatest fights in MMA history.
While many fight fans will not give Bonnar a chance in this fight, he could still be a tough challenge for the middleweight champ.
According to oddsmaker Nick Kalikas of MMAoddsbreaker.com (h/t MMAFighting.com), Anderson Silva has opened as a -1350 favorite over light heavyweight Stephan Bonnar in the new main event of UFC 153.Essentially, these odds signify that the longtime midd…
Essentially, these odds signify that the longtime middleweight champion has a 93-percent chance of success in the short-notice fight.
These odds may come as a surprise to some Bonnar supporters, but they seem to be accurate. In Silva’s two previous appearances as a light heavyweight, he collected a pair of first-round TKOs against James Irvin and Forrest Griffin.
While Bonnar is a dangerous opponent with both a solid chin and an underrated ground game, it’s hard to think he will fare better than Griffin, who twice bested him and also has career wins against Rich Franklin, Quinton Jackson and Shogun Rua.
The line is officially the biggest opening for Silva through his career.
By comparison, Jon Jones opened over Vitor Belfort as one of the biggest favorites in MMA history, and his line came in at only -925.
Some of the biggest underdogs in history have somehow overcome the odds to shock the world. In 2007, Matt Serra knocked out Georges St-Pierre to win the UFC welterweight championship despite the champ coming in at -1000. Likewise, BJ Penn was a -850 favorite to defend his belt against Frankie Edgar in Abu Dhabi at UFC 112.
It’s unlikely that Bonnar will defy the odds and dethrone the seemingly invincible Silva, but crazier things have happened.
Since the Anderson Silva vs. Stephan Bonnarreplacement main event at UFC 153 was announced, I’ve been waiting patiently to see what kind of absurd betting line would be tied to this fight, and the oddsmakers didn’t disappoint. As MMAWeekly informs us, Silva has just opened as a -1350 (!) favorite, compared to Stephan Bonnar’s +850 underdog line. Gambling n00b translation: A $1,350 bet on Anderson would net you just a $100 profit if he wins, while a $100 bet on Bonnar would pay off $850 in profit if he does the unthinkable. And if you’re trying to decide which guy to put money on, I can confidently say that either bet would be stupid as fuck.
That -1350 line represents the most lopsided odds for an Anderson Silva fight ever, and even surpasses the -1300 opening line that was given to Jon Jones against Vitor Belfort. In general, once the gambling line passes -1000 for the favorite, it’s a pretty clear sign that the fight is a dangerous squash match that shouldn’t have been booked in the first place. (Example: Cris Cyborg‘s -2000 opening line over Jan Finney, a fight that turned out to be exactly as competitive as we thought it would.)
Since the Anderson Silva vs. Stephan Bonnarreplacement main event at UFC 153 was announced, I’ve been waiting patiently to see what kind of absurd betting line would be tied to this fight, and the oddsmakers didn’t disappoint. As MMAWeekly informs us, Silva has just opened as a -1350 (!) favorite, compared to Stephan Bonnar’s +850 underdog line. Gambling n00b translation: A $1,350 bet on Anderson would net you just a $100 profit if he wins, while a $100 bet on Bonnar would pay off $850 in profit if he does the unthinkable. And if you’re trying to decide which guy to put money on, I can confidently say that either bet would be stupid as fuck.
That -1350 line represents the most lopsided odds for an Anderson Silva fight ever, and even surpasses the -1300 opening line that was given to Jon Jones against Vitor Belfort. In general, once the gambling line passes -1000 for the favorite, it’s a pretty clear sign that the fight is a dangerous squash match that shouldn’t have been booked in the first place. (Example: Cris Cyborg‘s -2000 opening line over Jan Finney, a fight that turned out to be exactly as competitive as we thought it would.)
Again, I’m not trying to convince you to bet on Bonnar here. I’m just saying, maybe on fight night you should go to a sports bar that’s showing the event, look for some poor mark who doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, and casually suggest that you think the black guy is gonna win. If you play your cards right, you might be able to get a free beer out of it.