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Will UFC 114 draw one million PPV buys? Plus: Is UFC on the same level as PRIDE in making superstars?
By Zach Arnold | May 14, 2010
I had to pull a couple of passages from the Observer’s Wednesday night radio show for you here.
The first passage deals with episode one of the UFC 114 Countdown show that will be hyping up Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, the ex-PRIDE star, against Ultimate Fighter and UFC homegrown star Rashad Evans. The winner of this fight will face Mauricio Shogun, a former PRIDE ace who is currently the UFC Light Heavyweight champion.
Given the name recognition of the fighters involved, can this fight at UFC 114 help the PPV draw one million buys?
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “We had the Quinton Jackson-Rashad Evans 24/7-style deal tonight, hyping up the PPV coming up at the end of the month and… I thought it was good, I didn’t think it was great. I think if there was a problem with it, if anything, it’s that… these guys had such a rivalry, they cut such great promos on each other, and I know that hardcore MMA fans are going to really like the fact that they showed a lot of training footage, but to me this is not about each guy’s training. This is about each guy trash-talking the other and there was not enough of it on this show.”
DAVE MELTZER: “I thought there was enough of it. I thought it was great, I really did. And as of the training… I thought that the training footage was pretty good in the context of what they showed, it was very-well edited and I thought that in particular with Jackson, Jackson really got himself over as like this, they really got to me got Quinton Jackson over and Rashad, it’s like he was enough of a star and training hard enough to where he looked like he was in the league of Jackson but Jackson just came off, I thought Jackson came off of the show, you know, between the training and the talking and then the personality profile of him growing like he was this bad dude, you know I mean I thought that they really did a great job with him. I liked it a lot, I think that that match is going to do tremendous business.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “Oh, it’s going to be huge.”
DAVE MELTZER: “It’s going to be, I mean I was watching that thing when it was over and it was like this is the best-promoted fight in a long, long time. I mean… perhaps, again I didn’t watch enough of the boxing 24/7’s just because I’m so busy with the wrestling, but of the stuff that I’ve seen this is already you know I mean it blows away Georges St. Pierre & Dan Hardy and I don’t know if it’s going to blow away BJ Penn & St. Pierre from last year, but this was, since then I mean, you know, Lesnar-Mir you know I guess it’s probably the best-promoted fight since Lesnar-Mir and we still got two weeks to ago.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “Yeah, I just felt, when I was like watching Ultimate Fighter. When I was watching Ultimate Fighter with these two guys on it, I really badly wanted to see them fight and with this one it was like, well, you know, I’m excited to see them fight, I don’t know if this makes me any more excited than I was going in, but it’s still very good. They obviously told the story of I guess Jackson, obviously I think everybody knows he does not like training and for a long time he didn’t do a whole hell lot of a training. He doesn’t like training, but he’s now since moving to the Wolfslair he’s doing a hell of a lot of training and they really played it up like this was a guy who did phenomenal in his career without really working all that hard in training and now that he’s working hard and training like a world-class athlete he’s going to go in there and kill this guy. And obviously they built up the same thing with Rashad, so, I mean it was a very good Countdown special, don’t get me wrong, and I think it’s going to do, easy, million buys this particular show.”
DAVE MELTZER: “Really? I don’t know if I counted a million, but I think it will be in that ballpark.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “I say a million buys.”
DAVE MELTZER: “A million buys, that’s still a lot. That’s a very, you know, I mean there have only been two, maybe two or three UFC shows that have hit that number and you know it takes you know that’s a lot of people and it’s really got to capture people’s imagination to hit that and it may, I think it’s going to be, it may hit a million. I don’t know. I think Lesnar and Carwin is going to be a little bit bigger, though, just because Lesnar’s a bigger name.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “Well, yeah, I think Lesnar & Carwin is going to beat it and I think if GSP and Dan Hardy did almost 800,000, then with a three-week Countdown special for this show, it should do a million.”
DAVE MELTZER: “It could, it could, we’ll see. It’s going to do a lot.”
The second passage is tangentially connected to the first one in regards to the fact that we are seeing PRIDE taped shows drawing good ratings on Spike TV (They did lousy ratings on Fox Sports Net, but then again it’s hard to get any traction on that network) and we are seeing some of PRIDE’s big stars do well in UFC right now.
So, the question being posed: Has UFC reached the same level and ability as PRIDE did in terms of making new superstars?
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “PRIDE, in the hey day, was a giant mega event. Tens of thousands of people, huge stars, just fans going nuts, I mean it was very different than Sengoku and such nowadays.”
DAVE MELTZER: “Yeah, that’s true, but I mean DREAM is still you know DREAM is still a good show. Sengoku, not so much. But yeah, I mean, nothing compares to PRIDE. UFC doesn’t compare to PRIDE realistically. I mean I’m not saying the fighters aren’t better you know or anything like that I’m just saying like and the atmosphere at UFC is good, you know in its own way, really good, but I mean I still don’t think it compares to PRIDE as far as going to an overall show, certainly not in making the fighters look larger-than-life. UFC, there are fighters that are larger-than-life because they keep winning and they’re publicized very well, but there are not as many as PRIDE made. I mean, you know, PRIDE made these guys into superstars because of the presentation and also by booking a lot of squash matches, which helped their aura whereas UFC they book a lot more evenly so it’s hard to have you know as many spectacular finishes or some guy, Wanderlei Silva, winning 17 in a row or something like that, that doesn’t happen in UFC, I mean you know you couldn’t do it because you’re fighting too many top guys over and over.”
Topics: Media, MMA, PRIDE, UFC, Zach Arnold | 10 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
I thought the Evans/Rampage Primetime show was the best UFC hype show I’ve seen in a long time. Probably since the Huerta/Florian one where Huerta did that great interview.
I just though both of these guys are so great at hyping a fight and both have that IT factor. I’m not sure about 1 Million buys, but I woudlnt be shocked if it did 750,000 buys.
Bellator’s event last night was their best so far. The fights were very competitive (well, not the main event). My only two complaints are:
1) They reused the video interviews for te 2nd round. That felt cheesy.
2) That was a Bantamweight Tournament without the required weight cut. 3 of those 4 guys would be cutting weight to avoid Aldo in the WEC.
I thought Lombard looked scary. He needs to be in the UFC stat…or in the very least Strikeforce to fight Miller, Lawler, Jacare and Manhoef.
He’s just head and shoulders above everyone else outside of those two orgs.
I was excited about Lombard when he came to the sport with his Judo credentials in 2004 and was pumped for his PRIDE debut a year and a half later.
He’s a fringe guy though. Always takes deals with small promotions. Lost his only two fights in the bigs against real opposition in Mousasi and Gono back in PRIDE.
I don’t think he’ll ever step up. Hope I’m wrong though. I’ve always expected to see big things out of him.
Well one of my big problems is that he’s around 5’9 which is pretty short for 185 iirc.
Yes he did lose to Mousasi and Gono – but as we’ve seen in mma post-2000, that’s light years given the evolution of the sport and the fighters. I think he’s leagues ahead of where he was in 04-05 (a green judo fighter with awesome raw talent and athleticism)…but again, we won’t know until he steps it up to fight people he’s not head-and-shoulders above.
I think it could get up there pretty high. The UFC may have a couple of million sellers this year.
Rest of the card is pretty bad though
It’s an interesting question you raise about creating stars, Zach.
Let me take my own stab at this.
Aside from Brock Lesnar there hasn’t been a big star established in MMA since the end of the first season of TUF.
Think about that.
GSP was a star already, so was BJ.
I don’t think PRIDE made bigger or better stars than UFC, per se. But PRIDE promoted younger and better athletes than UFC.
PRIDE promoted Fedor, Rampage, Cro Cop, Wanderlei, Nog and Shogun. Cop and Nog have pretty much washed out at this point. But the rest are still going.
UFC promoted Randy, Tito, Chuck and Matt Hughes. To a lesser extent BJ and GSP. Those three guys are all older and have huge holes in their games. UFC did a lot of favorable match making to set it up where Randy, Tito and Chuck only ever lost to each other. When they got thrown into the deep end of the pool they got exposed for what they are.
I think the real story is that MMA is having a problem creating stars with too many PPVs. It’s starting to settle in as a more popular version of boxing. Every year you get 1-3 big PPV sales and the rest is at the base level. UFC’s base level is around 500-600,000 PPVs boxing’s is around 300-400,000.
“Aside from Brock Lesnar there hasn’t been a big star established in MMA since the end of the first season of TUF.
Think about that.
GSP was a star already, so was BJ.”
This is completely wrong.
At the same time the fist season of TUF ended, GSP fought Jason Miller. GSP was a fighter sort of on the hardcore fans’ radar, but nowhere near a star. He was probably nowhere near as popular as Cain Velasquez is now, a guy you claim is not a star. GSP did not truly achieve stardom until his first fight with BJ, and arguably not a superstar until his second fight with Serra. Three years after the first TUF.
BJ has been an elite fighter for ages, but he has become much more popular and reached superstardom only over the past couple years.
I could go on all day, but you get the point.
I also think Zach confuses Pride fighters being among the top fighters in the UFC with the UFC’s inability to create stars. The UFC puts their muscle behind whoever wins, and obviously Pride had a lot of the top talent when they folded because they’d made more money for a long time. Rampage was a nobody in the US when he made his UFC debut two years after TUF 1.
There’s no disagreement about Jackson not being well-known when he went into UFC. UFC gave him a big push initially. I remember at the time of his fight against Liddell that I noted how much harder Liddell was getting pushed and how much more of a push there was for Liddell after he lost.
When I talk about “the PRIDE guys coming in and taking top sports in UFC,” I’m more or less referring to the fact that Shogun, Wanderlei, Jackson, had made a name for themselves in PRIDE. I’m not discounting the UFC promotional machine one bit.
“UFC gave him a big push initially. I remember at the time of his fight against Liddell that I noted how much harder Liddell was getting pushed and how much more of a push there was for Liddell after he lost.”
To this day that whole situation boggles my mind. I guess Dana was just:
(a) too loyal to Liddell for all his years of service;
(b) thought Liddell was still the more bankable name (an ignorant and stunted assumption) and could come back to take the belt back; and
(c) at the time I still think he was all about “PRIDE vs. UFC” fighters and wanted the UFC guys to be bigger. Look at all their poorly hidden glee and back-slapping any time someone beat someone from “Japan” – my favourite being the time Rogan said J. Silva slipped him a note during a Soko vs. Machida fight saying, “you’re not in Japan anymore”. Which seemed odd since both guys were products of Japanese mma (PRIDE and K-1/Inoki).