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If Versus loses distribution outlets, what will the health of WEC be?
By Zach Arnold | August 25, 2009
The WEC 9/2 Youngstown, Ohio show has been canceled. It is rescheduled for October 10th in another city. Between this development and the fact that Versus may be off DirecTV and things are not looking positive right now for WEC. In regards to the show cancellation and the reason given (fighter injury), Dave Meltzer said, “There’s something fishy going on.”
Dave Meltzer: “I think that what happened is is that um they that they don’t want to do that show on September 2nd if DirecTV pulls them on September 1st. So, they’re giving them so they’re pulling the show so they have, because it makes no sense for WEC, you know, I … it’s how I read it. I mean maybe Ben Henderson really is hurt, but the thing that’s really strange me to is um it’s like if he really was hurt, they would just put, why don’t they just do the match on the next show? I mean, they’ve never postponed an actual show over someone being injured, they always have a replacement.”
Bryan Alvarez: “They didn’t cancel Brock Lesnar vs. Frank Mir after Frank got hurt, so they’re not… canceling a show because they have a Ben Henderson injury? I don’t buy it.”
Dave Meltzer: “No, I don’t either. Plus, it’s September 2nd and September 1st is when at this point they may go off DirecTV so you know that seems to add up and plus the other one is is that there, the show isn’t going to be in Youngstown when they do the remake of the show on October the 10th, so to me that also seems to indicate that they sold no tickets in Youngstown plus the Versus thing, so I’m thinking there’s both of those things, I mean I don’t know what the advance was in Youngstown, no one ever told me. And the fact that no one ever told me, probably means it was poor or wasn’t great, if it was great I would have heard.”
Topics: Media, MMA, WEC, Zach Arnold | 51 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
I do not believe for one second that they are postponing an entire card because one (1) fighter got injured.
It is so obvious what they are doing. Postponing the fight until the Versus/DirecTV deal gets hammered out.
Kind of a wait and see approach.
Well, they were also having a hard time selling tickets to the show. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to venture out of the hard rock for this show? I love WEC and I don’t think I’d pay to go to this show.
The WEC has had some great fights this year (Torres/Mizugaki and Brown/Faber II), but realistically, they don’t have anything that appeals to much more than the most hardcore MMA fans, they’re treated like a minor league promotion, and so on. If the UFC plans on increasing the number of TV dates they fill, they should cut their losses with the WEC and put those guys in the UFC where they can get proper recognition and maybe start getting a real paycheck instead of having to move up a weight class or two to have the hopes of making a living wage fighting.
alan are you saying lower weight classes are not profitable? or that the ufc should just assimilate the entire promotion and expand the number of weight classes?
He is saying that WEC is not profitable for fighters. Faber and Torres are legitimate stars and make less than undercard UFC fighters.
Urijah Faber on a main card for UFC would make waaay better money than he does now.
Its possible that 135/145 can sell tickets eventually. Anything can forseeably sell tickets. Monkeys fighting robots could sell out Giants Stadium one day, for all I know. But the WEC sure as hell isn’t, and I’ve doubt it ever will with their current plan. Instead of having a fake lightweight champion, tear the crappy title off him and send those guys to the UFC. Let the WEC bantam/feather belts become UFC ones and we’re done. We don’t need a second fake promotion.
Does anyone think that the WEC won’t eventually be absorbed into the UFC?
Stinks for the fighters. I hate to see cancelled or postponed shows. The fact that the new show is only a month or so after the original date mitigates the problems, but still not a good thing to see.
Long term, I think it is becoming clear that the WEC needs to merge into the UFC. The UFC then needs to have a weekly TV show that gives them room to showcase all of the talent. Even with 3 additional weight classes (Fly is coming), the UFC would probably still need to go out and get more fighters as putting on a weekly show would take some a lot of talent under contract.
I wouldn’t even mind seeing a weekly show, with every other week being live. That would make the most sense money wise…. Put on a 12 fight card every two weeks, and a portion of it is live, and the rest is saved for the next week. And a few fights wouldn’t be shown at all unless they are really good.
Plus, with 8 champions, that is more main event slots, which is a good thing if they go on Network TV.
Fights every week would be overkill. People complained enough when UFC was running 3 cards in a month (the times they did the European show, a Fight Night and a Vegas show) so I don’t know how that would go over. You can make the argument that they can just work in the pro wrestling TV mold of having a bunch of low level fights for free and use it to advertise the monthly PPV, but that doesn’t work for the MMA model. They’ve got a great thing going of a Fight Night and Countdown as advertisement and one big show a month. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
^ Zuffa is going to have to try to do something with the WEC. I don’t know that I’d call the WEC “broke,” but it’s not operating at anywhere near the same level as the UFC.
You can make the argument that they can just work in the pro wrestling TV mold of having a bunch of low level fights for free and use it to advertise the monthly PPV, but that doesn’t work for the MMA model.
What they have now is the pro wrestling model. What weekly fight cards would more resemble is boxing circa 1950s. You know, when it was one of the three biggest sports in the US. Give me weekly fight cards, even mediocre ones, over contrived reality drama and overhyped prelims every and all days of the week.
There are huge differences between 1950s boxing and 2000s MMA. For starters, people only had 3 channels in the 1950s and today you have so many viewing options it’s much easier to relieve your burnout factor. Also the boxing talent pool was much deeper than the UFC/WEC, who have probably less than 300 fighters under contract. MMA fighters fight every 2 months at most and with 12 TV fights taped every other week plus two monthly supercards (the fight night and PPV) that’s going to stretch the roster thin and kill off whatever appeal your prelim fights had since these would be the guys fighting on TV so that would kill their video on demand business and possibly hurt the DVD sales.
And it won’t be overkill to hardcores, but to the casual fans that make UFC what they are today, they’re going to get burned out on MMA. Right now the majority of them watch Fight Night, maybe TUF and the PPV of the month so a UFC event means something. If you have a weekly show, it’s going to do what American pro wrestling did by adding Thursday shows in 1999, shortly afterwards the casual fans making the business boom got sick of seeing it and moved on.
And I’m sure some people would claim the NFL does multiple weekly shows and nobody gets tired of it, but they do big match ups every week which UFC/WEC wouldn’t do and also they have an off season where fans get a break from it, whereas MMA is 365 days a year.
MMA fighters fight every 2 months at most and with 12 TV fights taped every other week plus two monthly supercards (the fight night and PPV) that’s going to stretch the roster thin and kill off whatever appeal your prelim fights had since these would be the guys fighting on TV so that would kill their video on demand business and possibly hurt the DVD sales.
Whatever they’d lose from UFC On Demand having more stuff in the library they’d gain from sponsors and TV rights several times over. Hurt their DVD sales? I’m sure people are snatching them up not because of who was in the main event, but because of the guy who opened the show in front of 12,000 empty seats. Why would they even run Fight Night cards if they have a weekly show? C’mon dude, at least be reasonable with this argument.
If you have a weekly show, it’s going to do what American pro wrestling did by adding Thursday shows in 1999, shortly afterwards the casual fans making the business boom got sick of seeing it and moved on.
I thought the argument from wrestling fans is that wrestling stagnated and that they no longer do the right things. That’s certainly Dave Meltzer’s take on it, per his “if the WWE had interviews like the UFC, they would be the ones with the boom in business right now”. Is there consistency from the wrestling fans on this?
Alan, could you clarify something for me? If WEC is a fake minor league promotion what is Strikeforce?
I agree that WEC will be absorbed into UFC when th TV contract is up. It will let UFC do way
more shows on TV. Tthey could make the 135 and 145 belts TV titles.
Don’t forget the only reason Zuffa bought WEC was to fill the TV contract with Versus and to keep PRIDE from getting on TV here in the States. WEC has outlived it’s usefulness. It has also proven that being on Versus isn’t worth much.
There is another wrinkle to this story. MMAJunkie reported that the Ohio commission was going to do same day weighins. Fighters couldn’t gain more than 13 pounds between the two weighins. Now that the show is pulled I bet they drop hat BS if the UFC ever goes back to Columbus.
Alan, could you clarify something for me? If WEC is a fake minor league promotion what is Strikeforce?
A promotional group that bills itself as being the majors with only a couple major talents and lots of glitzy, worthless belts.
Don’t forget the only reason Zuffa bought WEC was to fill the TV contract with Versus and to keep PRIDE from getting on TV here in the States. WEC has outlived it’s usefulness. It has also proven that being on Versus isn’t worth much.
Exactly. If Versus is worth nothing and no one can succeed on it, then what value does Zuffa see in keeping other promotions from losing money there? Either they’re very stubborn or know something we don’t. Or they could be just bleeding them dry and killing their will to promote the sport like Top Rank did. Except that would be bad for MMA. But since it would be good for Zuffa….it would be good for MMA! Alright. There’s the spin.
They wouldn’t even have to do every week. They could do 12 weeks on, 4 weeks off. Fill in the downtime with UFC Unleashed fights. They kind of already have up and down times already….
Here is what can be done:
1. 9pm to 11pm every Wednesday
2. 12 Weeks on, 4 weeks off.
3. The 2 hour program acts as a Fight Night & Countdown Show combined. Live fights and hype for the PPV with multiple segments on the fighters. Live interviews will be the norm. Basically, what Friday Night Fights on ESPN really should be, but isn’t.
4. Major PPV’s during this 12 weeks cycle. Very easy to promote them…
5. UK Event is live on SpikeTV during the downturn 4 week cycle.
This does a few things. First, it allows them to have a bigger roster, which they need with more weight classes and if they want to completely take out the competition. Second, it combines all these random shows they have on now into one well molded weekly show.
Obviously this idea would have to be tweeked, and it is only a guideline…. But if they did something like this, I think it would benefit the UFC in the long run.
IF they did the 12 Weeks On, 4 Weeks off cycle…. They would be doing
1. 18 SpikeTV Shows (Over 36 shows)
2. 3 UK Events
3. 12 PPV Events
That is 33 Events Total. That should be enough. Put in a Network Deal in there with 4 to 6 events per year, and they have a fully functional operation that would be just enough MMA to give to the fans (the casual fans don’t watch every SpikeTV show anyways). And it gives them enough roster space for 8 divisions and to have enough up & coming fighters that they don’t have to worry about an organization like Strikeforce getting the fighters they don’t have room for.
There’s a hundred ways to do this if they want to do it, the above idea from 45 among them. Right now they run a bunch of WEC cards alongside a bunch of various UFC cards, sometimes within 24 hours of each other. WEC shows are sometimes during the week and sometimes on Sundays. Fight Night cards are the same way. Make it easier to watch the shows, have better quality fights on free TV, and make it look more like a sport and less like a pro wrestling/VH1 reality show smashup.
I’m speaking of the people who saw the pay per view telecast buying the DVD. I have no idea what UFC DVD sale numbers are compared to PPV numbers, but as someone who purchases most UFC DVDs and the PPV telecasts, if they’re running the prelim fighters into the ground for free I’m not going to care anymore.
Numbers actually started going down before the general feeling that the WWE product sucked in 2001. Wrestling viewership hit its peak in mid-2000 and started to decline after that when the trend of WWE being the hot thing on television wained. This was partially due to Smackdown being an additional 2 hours of wrestling.
I’m speaking of the people who saw the pay per view telecast buying the DVD.
I would guess that the majority of DVDs being correlate the majority of PPVs being bought. In other words, UFC 100 will probably be a much hotter seller than UFC 99, undercards having been televised be damned.
I have no idea what UFC DVD sale numbers are compared to PPV numbers, but as someone who purchases most UFC DVDs and the PPV telecasts, if they’re running the prelim fighters into the ground for free I’m not going to care anymore.
How are they going to “run them into the ground”? Just sign a bunch of dudes to fill out cards to nothing contracts for the dark matches on weekly UFN shows. Or use guys from TUFs that are still under contract. A ton of things are possible. No one is making you watch every fight, after all.
Numbers actually started going down before the general feeling that the WWE product sucked in 2001. Wrestling viewership hit its peak in mid-2000 and started to decline after that when the trend of WWE being the hot thing on television wained.
So has it not come back because there is too much wrestling on TV? Or is it because the product isn’t any good? It sure seemed like when there was a billion hours of wrestling on that it did fine. 2 hours a week of MMA is hardly the equivalent.
I don’t think Zuffa is doing anything dishonest like you suggest in post 15, Alan. I’m sure they are waiting for the TV contract to expire. I hVe never seen the deal. I would assume there are penalties to Zuffa if they don’t provide a certain amount of dates per year.
Honestly, weekly fights wouldn’t hurt UFC. If they can do a billion seasons of TUF why not just put on fight cards?
The prelim fighter roster is the best it has ever been, I don’t want to see it watered down because Unleashed, TUF, Best of PRIDE, Countdown and Fight Night isn’t enough UFC for Spike.
[…] DirecTV possibly dropping Versus and poor ticket sales may have also been contributing factors (Fight Opinion has the transcription). Definitely odd though for the WEC to move the entire event because of Ben Henderson though. No […]
If they had an increased schedule, things wouldn’t suffer that badly.
Right now, the WEC has only the top Feather & Bantam’s. They don’t have much room to fill out those rosters more. Instead of going 15 deep in those divisions, they could go 40 deep. The UFC MW, WW, & LW are that deep. That is where a good portion of the talent would be increased. This would not make the undercards suffer.
Not to mention the change it would have on the sport. Guys like Cole Miller & Frankie Edgar would almost certainly move to Featherweight as there would be no pay decrease. It would slightly thin out the Lightweight Division (which needs to be, because it is beyond stacked). And guys like Urijah Faber & Jose Aldo would likely drop down to Bantamweight, as neither are big for the weight class.
The ripple effect would only make the sport stronger, not weaker. Guys could compete at their natural weight classes regardless of money…. I like that.
I don’t think anybody would disagree WEC and UFC should merge. But why not just cut the deadweight to make room for stronger cards instead of watering down the product just to fit every single fighter you can so the competition can’t get them. If they did that every show could be so strong ratings go up to increase ad space worth and buyrates will bring in even more money than they are now. Right now they have a ton of fighters they could cut that nobody would shed a tear for to do this.
It appears everyone disagrees with me, but the whole idea (which I don’t think would happen anyway, since it would have happened already since UFC has been red hot for 4 years if it was) but I see it doing nothing but watering down the product and burning people out. Leave people wanting more.
The prelim fighter roster is the best it has ever been, I don’t want to see it watered down because Unleashed, TUF, Best of PRIDE, Countdown and Fight Night isn’t enough UFC for Spike.
I don’t understand. You would prefer to pay for the current UFC PPV prelims on 3 month delay rather than watch them for free on a weekly basis as part of a UFC weekly fight program because you fear it might get “watered down”?
They wouldn’t be as strong as they currently are, to the point that some shows you could argue the undercard is equally good as the televised, is my point. Unless they increased fighters fight frequencies which is impossible with medical suspensions.
You’d either have to stretch out the card quality to make sure at least one or two big fights happens on a show or you’re going to have “dry periods” where all the good fighters are used up so you have to get the European show crew in nobody really cares about. Unless the UFC swallows the MMA world whole the product quality is going to be spotty just for the sake of running events.
If the undercard is equally good as the televised, why would I prefer that level of fight be untelevised? Dude, you have deluded yourself into not wanting free live fights as if it were a good thing that they are only viewable on DVD months later.
8 Champions…. Assuming half of them fight 2 times a year and the other fight 3 times a year…. That is 20 Title Fights right there. You combine that with guys like Tito Ortiz, Urijah Faber, Rich Franklin… And other non-champion guys who could draw… And they have enough talent to put on this many shows.
Obviously there is a MMA boom right now. I personally think it will die down to some degree. But I don’t think the amount of programming will factor into that. People are already selective in what PPV’s they purchase or what shows on SpikeTV they watch. Those people likely don’t even have burnout right now, despite the high number of shows Zuffa is putting on. It’s the fans like us who can be burnt out because we talk about it everyday and we watch the UFC, WEC, Strikeforce, DREAM, Sengoku, etc….
I think there is enough talent in the 8 weight classes to put on a large number of shows per year.
This year, the UFC will have 20 events, WEC have 8 events. If they combined the shows and bumped it up to 35 a year, that isn’t a huge increase. If they do 12 fights per card, that’s an additional 84 fights throughout the year. That is just a few extra fights in the 5 main weight classes, and just bulking up the 3 smaller weight classes.
Not to mention combining the Fight Night and Countdown Shows is probably the best idea. The randomness of when the Countdown shows are on don’t make them the most effective. Having the hype built into a set time every week could only help business.
Pro Wrestling has 5 hours of programming a week, and the ratings stay steady. Baseball is on for 7 straight months, every single day. Football is non-stop for 5 months if you consider Fantasy Football and how involved people get with that. Basically, sports fan get devoted to a sport and support it. While I do think the UFC is at a peak right now, having a 2 hour program every week is not going to hurt them. If anything, that is minimal compared to most other sports.
Once again I’m in agreement with 45. Do you really think MMA will sustain? Strike while its hot, because it will burn out either way. Make your money while you can and then go with it.
MMA will sustain. I wouldn’t be shocked to see PPV’s drop to 3 tiers in the future:
1 PPV that has around 1 Million PPV Buys.
2 PPV’s that have around 500,000 PPV Buys
9 PPV’s that have around 250,000 PPV Buys
This is my prediction in about 3 years when things die down. However, that is still enough, along with a weekly show to sustain everything.
Let’s put it this way: When things do “die down”, the Zuffa’s best shot at keeping eyes on it is to run weekly TV, not to be running all over the place. Why not have that infrastructure now rather than wait and react? They might be able to delay that day for awhile.
Alan is correct. Plus, a weekly is basically the NEW Ultimate Fighter. What is the entire point of TUF? To get people thinking about the UFC on a weekly basis and to build stars.
That is exactly what a weekly show can do. The only difference is that they don’t live in a house together and it would likely be combined with the hype stuff like the countdown shows.
At this point, I don’t see how they can’t do it.
At the Dana White Q&A Session, somebody asked him about weekly fights. I forget his exactly answer but he basically said: He still wants TUF in there for now and SpikeTV would do it in a heartbeat (made it sound like they have already asked about it). And he didn’t seem opposed to the idea…. I just think he wants TUF to run it’s course. Personally, I already think it has, but TUF 10 will probably make it hot again for another season or two.
I could see UFC following the old 80’s pro wrestling style of TV by taping a bunch of matches then mixing them with interviews and hype for PPV’s.
My idea would be to tape one or two shows a month at the smaller Hard Rock venue in Las Vegas. If you are doing an hour show you would only need to do one taping a month. Two-hour shows would probably need two tapings.
Each show you could feature younger unknown fighters or former TUF contestants since they do have some recognition value with the audience. Each show could me main evented by some well-known veterans of PPV’s who probably aren’t in title contention but have a name (the Chris Leben, Jason MacDonald, Drew McFederies types). You could even throw in a classic UFC match to fill time or undercard matches from the previous PPV (a faster turnaround time from when they air on Spike now).
The show could also supplement the hype specials they air by airing those type of segments.
Comcast should sell Versus if they’re going to continue to do the half ass job of marketing the network. With Versus ranking 61st out of 74 english channels on Directtv I don’t blame them for dumping it
I think Versus is in major trouble. They have pretty much stated that they have one boxing card left and then they are going to stop broadcasting boxing shows (and are only doing the one last show because they owe it contractually to Tournament of Champions Promotions).
With the DirecTV developments I wonder if something bigger is going down there. Without Boxing or WEC the station is going to have a very hard time filling that 18-34 demo that are looking for. I can see hunting or fishing shows as cheap alternatives but not ratings getters… not the Sports Soup show that pretty much nobody watches.
I wonder how this will bode for the NHL also. If something bigger is happening behind the scenes it would not be WEC that would be in trouble, it would be the NHL as their eggs are almost entirely in the Versus basket as far as Cable Coverage goes and they are not a super hot commodity the way MMA is right now.
I really don’t know if a taped fight show would work for them. Results would leak, unlike in TUF and kind of spoil it for most people.
Part of the fun of watching fights is watching them live. It sucks watching a show from Japan and trying to stay spoiler-free before it can air on HDNet or whatever.
Versus still has a deal with Golden Boy for Club Nokia shows (one is this week), but as far as major shows go, they’re out of that business.
They’ve invested a lot into properties that have returned very little. The IRL has been a failure and the NHL isn’t doing too hot right now either. I can’t imagine they’ll actually lose DirecTV though.
I wonder how much time is left on the Versus deal. My understanding was that initially it was a one-year deal, three live cards.
Obviously it’s more than that now, because that was in 2007 and they ran seven cards that year. Six the following, and this card would have been their sixth this year, with another scheduled for November.
Also it seems like September is a cursed month for the WEC. Last year they were pushed back because of a hurricane.
For fights to be real fights instead of exhibitions, the results have to be made public at the time of the fight or shortly thereafter. TUF doesn’t have to make their results public because the fights are “exhibitions.”
You could do a variation on the show-a-week by having your two minor shows per month run the “main card” live then the second week you run the best prelims from the minor event and from the preceding PPV and you have an hour to hype the PPV show that weekend. Three or four months off a year and you have 16 to 18 numbered events (fight nights go away, but you have “Fight Night Live” every other week and “Fight Night Preview” on the other weeks). There are 15 numbered events held or scheduled for this calendar year.
The fact that the rescheduled show is not going to be in Youngstown says a lot about why the show was postponed, as does the DirecTV situation. As for why the show was rescheduled for Saturday, October 10, it could have something to do with the fact that Strikeforce is rumored to have a live Showtime event on that date.
I don’t think Strikeforce even knows what they are going to do for October yet. They had the Gurgel/Evangalista ShoMMA Event listed on their website a few weeks ago, and now it is gone.
As for the UFC…. I agree, they need to make the better fights live. There is no other way to do it really. Having it live every other week is fine, as long as those non-live fights aren’t that important.
[…] September 1st, which is coincidentally one day before WEC 43 was supposed to air. From a radio show transcribed by FightOpinion: “I think that what happened is is that um they that they don’t want to do that show on […]
Well, even in the “every other week” scenario I outlined, you would have live fights EVERY WEEK during each “season.”
You’d have a free live show every other weekend and a PPV on the off weeks. The show would run every week, just wouldn’t always have live fights.
Run it for eight weeks four times a year, take four months off a year to prevent bake-in, and you’re only talking 32 shows (16 PPV, 16 free).
From Reed Harris:
“I can tell you with all honesty that we had absolutely no discussion about that with VERSUS,” Harris said. “The DirecTV-VERSUS thing I don’t know a lot about other than what I read, like you guys. It has absolutely zero to do with what we did. VERSUS hasn’t even really discussed it with us, and VERSUS’ involvement in this whole process was really about a future date, and if they could plug us in on a future date.
“We’ve obviously got a show in November, so we had to do it sometime either at the end of September or early October, but we also had to give Henderson some time to recover from his injury. There was a lot of things that just kind of worked out for this.
As far as ticket sales go, we would never, ever cancel an event due to ticket sales,” Harris said. “We never have; we never will.
Ticket sales are important, but they’re just a piece of what we do when we go do a show. Obviously a major piece of that is the television and our viewers. The No. 1 priority for s when we learned of the injuries was to contact our broadcast partner VERSUS and discuss it with them. We mutually made a decision to postpone it.
http://mmajunkie.com/news/15968/wecs-reed-harris-says-ticket-sales-tv-contracts-did-not-factor-in-to-wec-43s-rescheduling.mma
I’ll address the trouble with prowrestling:
• Both WWE & TNA rarely creates new stars that you would care about unless you’re a hard-core or a constant viewer. The ones they do create, see Evan Bourn, have a habit of jobbing out to other wrestlers or disappearing from the main shows. (Smackdown & RAW)
• Titles in both companies are fought over by the same people month in and month out.
• Tag-team wrestling doesn’t mean sh#t these days.
• Bad and often-times piss-poor booking and storylines. (See 30 minutes of TNA to get a good idea…)
Example: Samoa Joe is suppose to be a bad-ass now in TNA with his “Nation of Violence” gimmick. For weeks we’re supposed to wonder about his “mentor”, who’s telling Joe what to do. (Most everyone who watches already knows…) They finally reveal his mentor on PPV, Taz, who has Joe join up with the “Main Event Mafia” to be Kurt Angle’s bitch. (Even though Joe became the “Nation of Violence” and sworn revenge as a result of Angle’s stable injuring him.) Taz is now a “face” announcer and has said that he no longer needs to mentor Joe. Why the hell would anyone take Joe seriously right now?
• Bad announcing. The concept of having a “face” and “heal” behind the mics is no longer existent.
• Outside of Wrestle Mania, Royal Rumble, and maybe Sumer Slam (which I forgot even happened this past Sunday) wrestling promotions give me no reason to care about PPVs. I can watch the rematch the next Monday or Friday after.
From Dave Meltzer:
“– Regarding last night’s speculation that the WEC show was being moved because there is a chance Versus will be dropped form DirecTV on September 1st, well, that’s not why it’s being moved.”
The way he phrases this, it makes me think there was a reason besides an “injury”. Has to be poor ticket sales.
“…it makes me think there was a reason besides an “injury”. Has to be poor ticket sales.”
There’s no convincing me otherwise, no matter what Reed Harris or any other WEC guy says.
Oh no doubt, I mean, who didn’t hear “Youngstown” and go, “eh?”
Hasn’t been a happening place in 60 years, and this is not the best time.
I still think it is the Commission and their goofy same day weigh-in scheme. That is worth canceling a show over. Zuffa can’t set the precedent that they will allow a Commission that doesn’t follow the Unified Rules to boss it around.