« Could the Nagoya Sumo tournament get derailed for good? | Home | Dave Meltzer: If Strikforce signs Dave Batista at a decent price, it shows how smart Scott Coker is »
ESPN barely covers Fedor losing to Fabricio Werdum
By Zach Arnold | June 27, 2010
It was pretty painful to see just how the network covered Fedor’s first loss in a decade or so. They showed a basic 15-second highlight of Werdum beating Fedor and had it tabbed as “MMA upset” and that was about it. It was treated the same way the Miguel Cotto-Yuri Foreman fight was treated by the network, which was not seriously at all.
If you’re a fight fan with any sort of passion, watching ESPN give 20 seconds of air time to a fight that you know means something to the business is just one of those things where you wonder whether you are clueless or if they are the clueless ones.
As far as general mainstream media coverage of the loss, there really wasn’t a whole lot of it. The attendance for the Strikeforce show was a shade under 13,000 at HP Pavilion in San Jose.
About the media coverage of the event — I had actually offered to write articles, for free mind you, to talk about Fedor’s fight in Strikeforce and basically the message I got told from editors of two major sports web sites is that higher-ups on their platforms didn’t want to see MMA coverage on their site, no matter if it was free or paid material. They wanted nothing to do with MMA. I was told to check back to see if there would be any interest in coverage of the upcoming Lesnar fight…
Topics: Media, MMA, StrikeForce, Zach Arnold | 7 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
It just goes to show that despite how far the sport has come in terms of mainstream coverage, it’s still just considered a drop in the bucket by the powers that be.
I can’t imagine the Cyborg vs. Finney fight last night helped matters at all.
These so called sports reporters only want to cover UFC, not MMA.
Here’s a question: If Strikeforce had bothered to promote Fedor as their champion instead of Overeem when he was picked up and not treated him as the “#1 contender”, might there have been a difference in coverage? I would guess no but still think it was a mistake to not do that.
The UFC gets pretty similar coverage on ESPN as well, perhaps the occasional highlight or even a preview segment on Sportscenter the Friday leading up to a big event is the extent of it.
As big as we would like to think MMA is in the grand scheme of the sports world, it is sadly insignificant.
Hell even in the major sports such as baseball there is severe bias on ESPN. My beloved White Sox are in the midst of one their longest winning steaks and a big turn around, yet barely get mentioned….what with all the important Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers news.
Forgot people’s opinions on Fedor for a moment.
What really hurt Strikeforce is that this was not a title fight. The challenger brought no interest to the table before the fight. And it was not on CBS.
Plus, the fact that Werdum left the UFC after a vicious KO greatly hurts this fight. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. It’s just public perception. That a guy who couldn’t cut it in the UFC tapped Fedor quickly. SF and Coker would have been in a much better position if Overeem beat Fedor.
Oh, and I find it bad of Coker and Showtime to promote the entire event that the winner of this fight would be get a title shot. And then at the end of the event, they are talking about Fedor/Werdum 2. For once they used a story line and they still can’t stick to it.
The winner of Carwin/Lesnar will now be the #1 Heavyweight. This leaves Strikeforce with no PPV. No #1 ranked fighter. And a lot of future money to pay to their fighters. You cannot book MMA like boxing. EliteXC and Strikeforce are great examples of this.
Everything Strikeforce does is wrong. It is crap. We all know it, we just can’t get ourselves to admit it.
Well, it just goes to show what I always say about….and why I love about MMA,… is true.
Anyone can beat anyone and anything can happen.
I was talking w/ a friend of mine about this fight. He was like, “there is no way Fedor can lose!”
I reminded him that anything is possible, and he was suprised I said this, being that I’m a pretty big fedor fan.
I went on to explain that Werdum has great submissions and that would be his game plan,of course. I said if fedor falls into his guard, this is where Werdum has his best chance at winning,…provided Fedor doesn’t smash his skull through the canvas first.
It doesn’t really suprise me what happened, even though I was pulling for Fedor.
Fedor has become over-reliant on the striking power in his fists and just smashing opponents. He is an excellent wrestler and submission fighter, as well as a great boxer. But if he was more patient, he more then likely would have won.
But Werdum deserved the win.
He had his game plan, worked hard at it, and was successful.
Maybe now Fedor’s camp/ M-1 will not be so demanding and *just maybe* there is an outside chance that they might negotiate with UFC.
If he doesn’t retire first.