1. IFL is losing money like nobodies business. They will likely be gone by the end of 2008 (only because of more stock being sold).

2. Bodog is not using any fighter who costs more then $10,000 a fight, so they are becoming a minor league system.

3. EliteXC is the best of them all, but they are still new, have 1 champion, and haven’t made a profit yet.

At the end of the day, the UFC pays their top tier fighters really well. It is up to the managers to work the best deals from there. If a fighter, based on his skill or experience, is only capable of getting even $5,000/$5,000 from the UFC, then likely he oesn’t even belong there to begin with.

Not sure if this has been posted before, but this says a lot about Gary Shaw:

http://www.bet.com/News/GaryShaw.htm

It doesn’t guarantee anyone below the top of the card making more money in the UFC, and in fact, it does quite the opposite. Ask fighters if they’d prefer single fight contracts ad nauseum based on their performance to long term deals and see what they say.

But when you see an event that grosses +$30M and has a payroll of $300-400K, that leaves a little to be desired.

Fighter salaries are fine. It’s called capitalism. The free market. Adam Smith, love that guy.

As I said – the teams that are in good markets and not in the markets that idiot Bettman and his syncophants are foolishly attempting to pursue are very successful. The lockout was basically the culmination of a bitter dispute and the refusal of either side to budge on their stances – put it this way, they settled on the one issue (hard salary cap) and the league’s revenues have risen to the point that the salary cap and average team payroll is HIGHER than the average payroll BEFORE the lockout season.

My two comments in my previous posts were separate.

1.) I don’t think you will see fighters with $250,000 yearly salaries – I’m sure they could if corporate sponsorship was getting aggressively pursued, however Dana White is an pigheaded idiot who does his best to piss all over the feet of people he shouldn’t be.

2.) Your “report” is just another one of your B.S. “facts” you love to present all the time, with absolutely nothing to back them up (other than “I heard/read etc.), to further your causes.

And you have to realize sports franchises are very complicated structures and entities these days. They are set up to lose money on paper in many cases. The Florida Marlins championship team in the late 90’s claimed a huge loss on the franchises books, while another entity was able to claim all the profits – this is obviously a big glossing over of the whole situation, but that’s the basics. Franchises make money in their gain in value – perfect case – the Nashville Predators that are in a terrible market and are going to be moved were on the block to Jim Ballsile for $230M which is about $100M more than the franchise was originally awarded for. I’d hardly call a league unsuccessful when one of its “weak” franchises has doubled in value in less than 10 years.

Which is exactly why you test every month. You may miss them this month, you may miss them next month, but eventually you’re going to get the hit on the drug or the masking agent or T/E.

You’re extremely likely to find it in the first three months. With random testing only when fighters get in the ring, you may never catch cheaters.

Or maybe he lost to Sherk getting his cycle right that time and skills.

Fighters know exactly when they will be tested and can cycle round that accordingly.