At this point, the fans really dislike Lesnar. I can only imagine the promo work the UFC could have done to build up Fedor with their video library from Pride and I assume Affliction now.

You mean airing the same fight footage of Fedor beating “hand picked non-top 10 heavyweights”? See, that’s the problem, Dana and all of his minions is on record burying everything Fedor has ever accomplished, but then they go and talk about how awesome the Countdown show would be showing a Fedor HL reel. In UFC’s current burial of Fedor if he comes in 18 months from now (or sooner) how are they going to pull a 360 and talk him up?

I don’t think Fedor-Lesnar would do the same numbers UFC 100 did. There’s no way to make a quiet Russian guy who doesn’t speak English compelling to get to that level of buys. Fighters popular for their fighting (ie Machida, Fitch, Anderson Silva) don’t do over 600,000 if they’re lucky and have someone with personality to carry them. It would probably do over a million, maybe 1.1 tops but it would not sell enough to get the $5 mil payoff.

Fedor doesn’t have a compelling story. He’s a stoic Russian nationalist who counts Putin as a friend, spends his free time painting and shuns the spotlight. How he could possibly be a MMA babyface to Lesnar to casual fans is going to be tough. If anything Brock might be seen as the babyface to a lot of people.

Josh Gross always talks about the best fighting the best. Fedor had a chance to fight the best and turned it down.

And now Josh Gross is defending Fedor going to Strikeforce.

I can’t stand Gross. He is a cheerleader for Fedor & Rampage. It’s like he has a mancrush on both of them. Doesn’t make for fair reporting….

45 Huddle whats left to say, you obviously have no concept on business let alone reality. Fedor outside of the UFC is his own man. In the UFC he is a slave of Dana White. He has always fought the elite fighters, if White had any decency at all he would place his champion against Fedor and let the cards fall.

What Meltzer did wrong was that he seemingly made little effort to verify the guaranteed money figures UFC gave him. At least he was open about the fact that he hadn’t verified them when he reported those figures and where he got them from, but from supposedly the best MMA reporter out there I expect better. As soon as Jonathan Snowden and Loretta Hunt reported their stories, he changed his tune on the Observer message boards and admitted that they were right and the $5,000,000 + PPV cut rumors were BS.

This follows a worrying trend that Meltzer only seems to report stories that UFC don’t want out in the public domain until someone else like Loretta Hunt reports them and then gives the Zuffa spin on the story.

I think a win over over Lesnar would opened up numerous sponsorship opportunities beyond what we can even imagine. No MMA athelete has made it to the level of an NFL or NBA athelete yet in terms of sponsorhsip, maybe GSP will, but I think Fedor would have been an easy sell given his unassuming everday man like appearance. .

So Meltzer’s info should immediately be disregarded because he works for Yahoo? I guess all the news Chris Mortenson breaks on ESPN should be taken with a grain of salt since ESPN has a TV deal with the NFL. Same goes for Jay Glazer, since he works for FOX and they have a TV deal with the NFL that means Jay Glazer can not be trusted.

How bout we just end this discussion by you providing the the real facts about Fedors contract offer. Obviously since you know enough about the subject to say that all these reporters who talked about the UFC’s contract offers were lying, than you obviously must know the real terms to the contract that was offered.

Objectivity is not welcome with the Zuffa groupies & Dana worshipers.

Prepare for continued attack.

there is nothing said in the article about guaranteed money. he gave a range of money that fedor would have likely received based on PPV numbers — thats the part where he says “would have received somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million for a Lesnar fight in the event the fight was an unlikely flop on PPV” — whatever his payday is plus very lowballed PPV bonus money obviously. and of course when he says “if the fight did similar numbers to last month’s record-setting UFC 100, Emelianenko likely would have received $6 million when pay-per-view bonuses were factored in” he is justifying a high end figure.

i dont know what youre on about here. im not saying meltzers a saint, but so far all youve displayed is a lack of reading comprehension. there is nothing in the article to substantiate that what dave syas is any different from what snowden says, and if you work out the numbers yourself you would see that youre searching for a way to discredit meltzer.

And now Josh Gross is defending Fedor going to Strikeforce.

I can’t stand Gross. He is a cheerleader for Fedor & Rampage. It’s like he has a mancrush on both of them. Doesn’t make for fair reporting….