Good question, Brule
It’s causing a bit a stir.
June 1, 2012 at 1:00 am
Mixed martial arts fans eventually will tell UFC: Enough is enough
Running so many shows might finally be catching up to the UFC.
When news broke Saturday following UFC 146 that middleweight Vitor Belfort broke his hand and was out of his UFC 147 main event bout with Wanderlei Silva, everybody immediately began thinking of suitable replacements.
Well, there was one problem: There wasn’t anyone to fit the bill.
Finally on Wednesday, the UFC settled on former middleweight champion Rich Franklin, pulling Franklin out of his UFC 148 bout with Cung Le in the process.
The rematch between Silva and Franklin will take place June 23 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and will be the last of four fight cards for the UFC this month.
Here’s the problem: When the fight between Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen had to be moved from 147 to 148, the stock of the card dropped drastically. Subtracting Belfort and adding Franklin, who hasn’t fought since February 2011, weakens it even further.
The co-headliner, a heavyweight bout between Fabricio Werdum and unheralded Mike Russow, isn’t lighting many worlds on fire and the rest of the show will feature Brazilian fighters who have little exposure in America.
Then you add in that this card is being used mainly as a backdrop for the finals and undercard of “The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil,” a show that won’t even begin airing on American television until this month, and you have the recipe for an all-time low modern-era pay-per-view number, especially considering the following pay-per-view, 148, is highly anticipated.
MMA overload
The UFC is running four shows this month, three on FX, starting with “The Ultimate Fighter: Live Finale” at 9 Friday on FX, and then two of the following three Fridays, as well. The UFC will go back-to-back nights with UFC on FX 4 in Atlantic City, N.J., and UFC 147 in Brazil.
The overflow of cards creates a serious depth issue which becomes apparent when a big-name fighter pulls out, but was even more of an issue than usual when Belfort pulled out. Every other suitable middleweight already was booked, or, in the case of Alan Belcher, was hurt. That led the UFC to move Franklin up a few weeks and make his fight with Silva a 190-pound fight, essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul.
As it stands now, it’s insulting to ask the fans in the United States to pay $54.95 for a show that would compare to many of the company’s offerings on FX, not to mention a show that features fighters very few American fans have seen. It’s a near-certainty many fans will voice their displeasure by not ordering the pay-per-view, especially when the UFC is running two of them in July.
The UFC has to ask itself how much is too much? The company already has run 12 events this year, with four more to come this month and three in July. If you’re scoring at home, that’s 19 events in seven months. That’s a lot for even the most ardent MMA fan. Then you add in two seasons of “The Ultimate Fighter: Live,” the one just concluding and one in the fall, and you have a whole lot of UFC programming.
It’s tough to say whether the company is overexposing itself quite yet, but it sure feels that way when they are presenting pay-per-views like UFC 147. It’s an interesting odyssey for a company that will run nearly as many events this month (four) as it did in all of 2004 (five), the year before they hit it big.
If the quality of shows remain good, that’s great for the fans. But even the best, most action-packed shows really don’t mean much if nobody’s watching, do they?
Matt Bishop is a radio host at BloodyElbow.com. Read his MMA column for The Detroit News, “The KO Corner,” every Friday at detroitnews.com.