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Last minute notes
By Zach Arnold | April 7, 2007
Sherdog reports that the attendance for the IFL show tonight at Mark of the Quad Cities in Moline, Illinois is a little under a 50% house.
The IFL on FSN show last night showed fights between the San Jose Razorclaws (Frank Shamrock) and the LA Anacondas (taped 3/17 from the LA Forum). The opening fight was Brian Ebersole vs. Alex Schoenauer. I was absolutely floored at just how many empty seats there were on all four sides of the ring. It made the Schoenauer fight look like a pre-show warm-up encounter. I do have to say, however, that the IFL shows on FSN are far superior than their MyNetworkTV shows.
Dave Meltzer reports that Ultimate Fight Night drew a 1.2 rating (not great) and that the first edition of The Ultimate Fighter drew a 1.4 rating (good).
Nobuyuki Sakakibara is promising “a big surprise” at tomorrow’s PRIDE 34 show.
The line-up order for the PRIDE 34 event:
- Edson Drago vs. Yoshihiro “KISS” Nakao
- Butterbean vs. Zulu
- Makoto Takimoto vs. Zelg Galesic
- Gilbert Yvel vs. Akira Shoji
- Don Frye vs. James Thompson
- Shin’ya Aoki vs. Brian Lo-A-Njoe
- Ricardo Arona vs. Sokoudjou
- Kazuyuki Fujita vs. Jeff Monson
Wanderlei Silva will not fight at the event.
Topics: All Topics, IFL, MMA, Media, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 6 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback | Share This
Saki is gonna whack the Ferttitas!
Be glad you got to see IFL. My FSN station totally blew this off to show high school basketball and it looks like they’ll skip the show this week.
I have yet to see a single commercial for any IFL-related shows. I’m a fairly hardcore fan, but I have no interest in seeing their taped product, partially because there is so little buzz around it. It doesn’t portray the product in a good light when the fighters are fighting in a half-empty stadium with a dead crowd.
Now now David, UFN wasn’t that bad.
Their next show at the Mohegan Sun isn’t exactly selling well either. The building is only built for 10,000 fans. They cut off half of the building according to Ticketmaster. And a lot of seats are still available. I would be shocked if they get above 3,500 paid attendance.
It’s a mistake by IFL to be running this show head to head w/ UFC. It should have been on Friday night. Unless you actually know one of the competitors why spend money on IFL tickets as opposed to ordering UFC on PPV?
That said, these are just TV tapings for IFL at this point. They still have at least three or four months to build botht he TV rating and the attendence marks. But they need to step it up. They should be trying to get Bas vs Frank Shamrock, Renzo vs Ken Sham, Ken vs Frank, Bas vs Dan Frye those kinds of fights to draw interest in the their shows. A lot of the kids in IFL are fun to watch, much more fun that than that awful UFN show, but they need a draw to get eyeballs to tune in.
IFL death watch anyone? These half empty shows nobody seems to care about must be bleeding them dry.