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Odds and ends heading into UFC 116
By Zach Arnold | July 3, 2010
Listening to the Observer show on Friday night, a few things stood out to me:
It’s going to be a pro-wrestling circus there at the event with Jim Ross, Steve Austin, Batista, Rock, Bill Goldberg, Paul Heyman, and others from the wrestling world in attendance.
The winner of the UFC 116 main event will face Cain Velasquez next. If Brock Lesnar loses, he will face Frank Mir. If Shane Carwin loses, nobody knows what’s next for him.
After Fedor lost to Fabricio Werdum last weekend, a lot of bettors put their money on Shane Carwin as an underdog to beat Brock Lesnar.
Dave Meltzer claims that Fedor is a bigger name than Shane Carwin or Cain Velasquez.
A lot of discussion focused on how the UFC 116 event has good, but not great heat in Vegas. About 4,000 showed up for the weigh-ins. Almost all of the blame, if you want to call it that, is on Carwin (according to Dave) for not doing the proper PR to heat it up. It was noted that all the leading indicators heading into this show are less than what Rashad Evans vs. Quinton Jackson did a little over a month ago. The Countdown show didn’t draw nearly the ratings expected, the weigh-ins didn’t attract a heavy crowd, and largely the only media focus about the event is on Brock Lesnar and that’s it. As Jordan Breen noted, Brock is the only thing people care about in the media both in Canada and the States.
There is talk of people hedging their bets about the PPV buy rate being around a million buys. Some discussion of 800,000 buys.
Dana White wanted to book Quinton “Rampage” Jackson vs. Lyoto Machida but Rampage turned the fight down because he was afraid it would be a boring fight. So, he wants a fight with Antonio Rogerio Nogueira. Rashad Evans doesn’t want to fight until he gets his title shot against Shogun, which could be in March. UFC would like Rashad to fight someone like Rogerio but Rashad’s not interested. Instead, Rampage will likely end up fighting Rogerio. Lost in all of this mayhem is the name Jason Brilz.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 12 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Rampage is currently in Hawaii. I ran into him at one of the local strip clubs on Thursday. I thought he’d be a bigger person in real life but his build is pretty average. He was really cool though.
Carwin should then fight Dos Santos if he loses.
The buyrate to me is up in the air. It certainly will not come close to UFC 100. They have done an absolutely horrible job promoting this since neither guy wants to do any major promotion (which Lesnar rarely wants to do anyway and Carwin supposedly won’t because he’s pissed off about his pay day.) And Lesnar has been gone for a full year and while people don’t think it’s a big deal, look at the momentum guys like Tito and Liddell lost taking an extended period of time off. MMA is incredibly fast-moving, so while he won’t exactly bomb he certainly won’t reach the level he was at in 2009. If he fought months after UFC 100 he would have done another guaranteed monster number since he was read hot. But really this fight has nowhere near the buzz Evans-Jackson did. I predict 900-950K, which is great but a bit of a disappointment compared to what it would have done a year ago.
That’s the second time Rampage has turned down a Lyoto fight, though it isn’t nearly as bad as the first time when Lyoto was the champion.
[…] Zach Arnold has an update from Dave Meltzer on the light heavyweight division, specifically Rampage Jackson and […]
Gotta love how hard people are trying to spin things when it comes to UFC 116, it seems now that Fedor lost they are reaching for a negative of such a huge show for the UFC.
Gotta love how you don’t have anything positive about the event to say yourself, that you have to be a negative jackass to continue your one-man war against the amassed forces of the anti-Zuffa empire that control the Internet.
And really, how is this a huge show? Brock vs. Carwin…then a sub UFC Fight Night event. For $50.
Really, who’s drinking the Kool-Aid, now?
When you have the biggest name in mma and the biggest HW fight there has been in years it’s a huge show you gotta be trying really hard to say it’s not.
Also how i’m I the negative one when i’m not the one trotting out insults and getting butthurt because I don’t follow the anti-Zuffa script that most of you do?.
UFC 116 is going to be a great show and instead of sitting back and enjoying it alot of fans and writers are reaching for something negative to come from it. That needs to be called out, maybe it hit to close to home but that says more about you than it does me.
I’m sorry, when has anyone said anything anti-Zuffa or anything about Fedor or Werdum in this thread, until you? Questioning that the buyrate might not be over a million is anti-Zuffa?
You have a serious persecution complex, and every post of yours is more or less exactly the same. Hey, look, I’m EJ!
“Suck it Zuffa haters, this UFC will be the best yet and if you don’t like that or agree then you’re just a PRIDE nut-hugging bitch who can’t appreciate the best fight ever that is featured on this card or maybe it was the last one I spilled the same amount of gushing praise on, it’s hard to tell since I am so full of hyperbole about every single event and exist on this board solely to spout the same rhetoric in every post.”
Who has said it isn’t a major show?
It is pointed out that the buzz going in isn’t as strong as Jackson-Evans had, which is an indisputable fact, as there were more articles and web searches on it and the weigh-in didn’t attract as big of a crowd. And some people are questioning (not stating as fact) that maybe it won’t do a million buys after all.
So what? Doing under a million is still damn successful. Especially with Carwin not helping Lesnar sell the fight like Frank Mir did.
With Dos Santos already booked against Roy Nelson, and with Cheick Kongo tied up with Travis Brown in October, I figure Carwin (if he loses) gets Ben Rothwell or Mike Russow.
Would anyone really be interested in Lesnar/Mir III?
If Lesnar loses, Lesnar vs. James Toney.
Winner of this fight against Toney after he destroys Couture. UFC-IBA heavyweight unification!!