Fight Night in America: UFC on Fox

(This is the first of a two part series looking at last Saturday’s big fighting events. In this article, I’ll discuss the UFC’s debut on Fox TV. In a subsequent article, I’ll turn my attention to the Pacquiao/Marquez fight.)

In many ways, the ‘general’ sports media properties like ESPN are becoming an anachronism—even if they were a top notch, well oiled machine of journalistic excellence they simply can’t provide anything more than superficial coverage to the ever widening sports marketplace, let alone individual games. This has given rise to countless media outlets—particularly online—that specialize in individual sports. In many ways this is a good thing, since they can provide a depth and breadth of information impossible for the generalists. That’s evident in sports betting—a market segment that ESPN can only flirt with lest they alienate the big sports leagues—and so too in fight sports.

The fight sport media worked overtime last Saturday big events in both boxing and MMA. But with all due respect to their passion and expertise, these sites are often myopic to how their sports are viewed and judged by casual fans and the elusive ‘mainstream’ audience that both boxing and MMA are trying to entice. A macro view is essential to analyzing these events—the UFC card in particular was intended as almost a ‘infomercial’ to bring in new fans.

The concept of whether or not an untapped ‘mainstream’ is still relevant is a huge question in itself—in a media world that is becoming more and more fragmented and compartmentalized, where everything is sold via subscription and pay per view the trend is clearly away from the mainstream. Boxing has survived for years despite alternating indifference and contempt from the mainstream, and the UFC more recently has built a billion dollar brand despite being marginalized by the mainstream. Even the big sports leagues like the NFL are trying to move away from the mainstream with their own networks.

In recent years, a major network TV presence has been the white whale of the UFC hierarchy and particularly Dana White. They’ve been close to deals before—most notably several years ago when negotiations with HBO broke down over production control. In my view, this could go down as the biggest mistake in the promotion’s history—HBO’s production and marketing of boxing is first rate and could have helped the UFC in countless ways (imagine, for example, a ‘Legendary Nights’ type series with great UFC moments like Randy Couture’s heavyweight title win over Tim Sylvia). White has a bad habit of burning bridges—his ‘talk first/think later’ style is beloved by UFC fanboys but has hurt the promotion in their dealings with the corporate world—particularly the image sensitive broadcast TV networks. Advertisers have also been slow to hop on the MMA bandwagon and the confluence of these factors relegated the UFC to secondary cable networks like Spike TV.

Just getting a deal with Fox was a big moment for the UFC, but based on their first effort it remains to be seen if the network will get a good return on investment and/or if the UFC can bring in new fans and boost their slumping PPV buyrates (down 25% this year). A big problem for the UFC has been developing new stars—the superstars of the sport’s adolescence like Randy Couture, Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell are well past their competitive prime and few of their younger fighters have been able to match their predecessors in terms of star power.

From the ‘starmaking’ perspective, things couldn’t have gone worse for the UFC. The main event (and the only fight on the broadcast) was completely noncompetitive with Junior Dos Santos bludgeoning champion Cain Velasquez to win the title in a little over a minute. White responded to a less than fortuitous outcome for his company in the worst way possible, basically ‘burying’ both fighters in his show ending commentary. White was horrible in his role as a commentator throughout—early in the broadcast he was visibly shaking and insisted on YELLING THROUGHOUT THE BROADCAST. This is probably the worst thing about watching any UFC event, though most of the time it’s Joe Rogan doing the YELLING IN HIS POST FIGHT INTERVIEWS DESPITE THE FACT HE’S HOLDING A MICROPHONE AND NO ONE ELSE IS YELLING! When Brock Lesnar—derisively referred to by one MMA writer as a ‘meat cube’–comes off as a more polished broadcaster than the promotion’s president that’s a serious issue.

The UFC on Fox card has been widely ridiculed by mainstream sports fans and media members, but these types weren’t going to like anything they saw. Some of their critiques were valid and even knowledgeable MMA analysts questioned the wisdom of having only one fight on the show with an hour of ‘build up’. The pro wrestling strategy has always been to start the show with a ‘hot match’ and that would have been a great benefit here. Ironically, the semifinal fight (broadcast on the UFC’s Facebook page) was a potential ‘fight of the year’ between Clay Guida and Ben Henderson. When fans started to wonder why this scintillating bout wasn’t shown on the Fox broadcast, Dana White’s response was typically boneheaded telling them to “quit complaining”. White is oblivious to the fact that these ‘complainers’ are people who actually care about the product and support it financially. His arrogance and attitude that he’s doing the world a favor by allowing it to pay him to watch fights are his most off putting qualities (along with his Tourettes’ like over reliance on the ‘F-bomb’ in his vocabulary) and is setting the UFC up for a potential disaster. Most companies whose business is off 25% are smart enough to listen to their customers for possible remedial strategies; White insults and belittles them.

The MMA media was split with the usual UFC sycophants saying that it was a monumental victory and more objective voices proclaiming it a disaster. The raw number of viewers was good (5.3 million) and a huge audience by MMA standards but brought into stark perspective by the fact that the lead in show—a re-run of the reality police series “Cops”–drew 5.4 million viewers. The promotion pointed to very strong numbers in their most reliable demographic (males 18-35) but that doesn’t do much in terms of expanding their fanbase.

In my view, however, the show—as well as the entire notion of the UFC on broadcast TV—has few upsides for the promotion. The short fight may have seemed anticlimactic to ‘mainstream’ viewers but is a frequent outcome in the sport. And therein lies a huge problem—MMA isn’t something that new fans see and immediately get ‘hooked’ on. It’s a highly nuanced and technical sport—very fascinating when you know what’s going on but not something you can pick up quickly. For that reason, the only thing the UFC has to ‘sell’ to the ‘mainstream’ is the potential of violence but that doesn’t solve the problem—new viewers are still faced with a sport that is very technical in nature and often highly tactical in practice. It also does a disservice to fighters and serious MMA fans who are subjected to impatient yahoos booing whenever a fight goes to the ground or whenever the competitors try to take a tactical approach to the standup game. All you need to know about this dichotomy is the fact that the most watched MMA fight in history involved YouTube brawler Kimbo Slice. He was a marginal fighter at best, but promised and delivered violence instead of technical excellence. It’s also why UFC 100 drew 1.7 million PPV buys and no subsequent event has even come close—a lot of curious newcomers were drawn in by an unprecedented media blitz and Brock Lesnar in the main event but for whatever reason they didn’t find the reality of the sport compelling enough to come back.

A bigger issue, however, could be the changing landscape of not only the broadcast media but popular culture as a whole. Gone are the days when TV viewers had to rely on three television networks for news, sports, entertainment and everything else. Now every interest—no matter how obscure—can be served directly through a variety of digital based platforms That’s why we’re nearing the end of the network paradigm altogether—more and more media is being consumed but the growth is outside of the ‘walled garden’ of corporate gatekeepers. Networks realize this which is why the smart ones are trying to stay relevant by making content available through channels like mobile phones and online. The traditional broadcast networks are simultaneously trying to re-invent themselves while doing what they can to aggregate as many viewers as possible with ‘lowest common denominator’ programming.

To some degree all sports are a ‘niche sport’ and you don’t need mainstream acceptance—whatever that means—to achieve success. NASCAR is a perfect example—they were ridiculed for years and many still write off stock car racing as a sport for rednecks. Despite this, NASCAR is second only to the NFL in the cold, hard cash they bring in. There are many similarities between NASCAR and the UFC, primarily because both are very technical and complex sports that are misunderstood by the mainstream sports media. NASCAR became a multi-billion dollar juggernaut by identifying their most passionate fans and giving them what they want. They’ve got enough mainstream exposure to attract a steady stream of new fans, but they’re fully focused on their hardcore fans knowing that’s what drives their financial success.

That’s where Dana White’s ‘quit complaining’ attitude becomes a serious problem—a NASCAR bigwig would certainly be reprimanded and very likely fired if he made such a derisive comment to a paying customer. The longterm winning strategy for the UFC is to embrace and nurture their highly passionate core audience—quit arguing with them and swearing at them and find out what they want to see and give it to them. NASCAR drew up the blueprint and the UFC has the passionate fan base armed with plenty of disposable income. The current UFC management is likely too arrogant and shortsighted to pull this off, but it’s the most direct path to even greater financial success. Chasing a mainstream audience that might not even exist is counterproductive and to the extent that it alienates the UFC’s most fervent and loyal supporters could ultimately be fatal.