« What would happen if Urijah Faber had to fight his protégé Joseph Benavidez? | Home | Anecdotal talk that UFC 115 bombed at the bars and movie theaters »
Talk Radio: UFC’s obsession with pushing hairless, young boys with six-packs and why fans not interested in UFC 115 had an agenda
By Zach Arnold | June 14, 2010
With Luke Thomas being in Las Vegas, Chad Dukes took over the reigns this week on MMA Nation and he made a couple of arguments that I wanted to point out to you.
The first argument is a bad one, let’s make that clear. It’s an argument about how people who weren’t interested in UFC 115 somehow had an agenda. It’s like the “you’re not a real fan of the sport” argument in essence. He makes a comparison to football, since he’s a football fan, and logically it’s an argument with gaping holes.
I can tell you what the level of fan interest was going into the show and what it has been coming out of it, since MMA coverage is something I spend a lot of time on. Our best day this past week for traffic was yesterday (Sunday). The other six days of the week, which lead into the UFC 115 show, absolutely fell off a cliff. When you have this kind of data, it points to one conclusion — people were interested in the results but had zero interest in buying or watching the UFC 115 show. Simple as that. It didn’t matter if you were a casual fan, a semi-hardcore fan, or a hardcore MMA fan, your interest wasn’t piqued very much by the prospects of this show featuring Chuck Liddell’s last fight.
With that setup, here’s the first passage from the radio show:
CHAD DUKES: “I love BloodyElbow.com. I think it’s a great web site. But I get pissed off sometimes when I read it because I went over there and to be fair it wasn’t just their web site, I saw this on a lot of different sites. They’re like, ‘this card sucks and there’s no relevant fights on this card.’ I don’t understand like I watch football, I’m a football guy, I watch the NFL and sometimes the Bengals play the Browns and that game never means anything, it never means dick. But it’s two NFL teams and sometimes they get together and they put on good shows.”
CO-HOST: “You’re still watching football.”
CHAD DUKES: “Watching good football and sometimes it happens. I don’t like this mentality where it’s got to be young freak phenom vs. young freak phenom for a title shot for the fight to mean anything. If you can’t get up for Chuck Liddell fighting, for Mirko Cro Cop fighting, I question your agenda. I question what it is you’re saying, that’s all I’m going to say. There’s a lot of people that know a lot more about MMA than I do, but I don’t think knowledge necessarily makes their opinion right sometimes because a lot of people were criticizing that card last night and I saw a lot of people get right online and say it was a great card after it happened and that’s why I wait, that’s why I always wait. Sometimes the UFC will put on a snoozer. The card that came here to Fairfax (Virginia) was a snoozer. This one was not. This had some great fights in it.”
CO-HOST: “Well, that’s I guess, that goes into the whole quantity over quality thing. I mean a lot of people are complaining, I mean this sounds ridiculous, but a lot of people were saying to me last night that the UFC is putting on way too many cards.”
CHAD DUKES: “C.K., our program director, said that.”
CO-HOST: “But I mean it’s like you know would you rather… I don’t consider myself an MMA elitist, you know, if you are an [OK] fighter like Ben Rothwell now or if you can guess really quickly like Gilbert Yvel did, I still want to see those guys fight.”
CHAD DUKES: “That was a great fight with two guys that had everything to gain.”
CO-HOST: “It’s obviously they’re not going to get a title shot any time in the near future.”
CHAD DUKES: “No, but it ended up being a damn entertaining fight and you just saw two monsters putting it on the line.”
CO-HOST: “Exactly, exactly.”
Let me explain the gaping logic holes in this argument…
- You don’t pay to watch football. You watch it on broadcast networks for free. Those who do pay for football pay for access on a DirecTV satellite to get a palette of games every week, including the Red Zone channel. You’re not paying $50 or more to watch a single football game.
- Football is a seasonal sport. UFC runs every single month, usually bi-weekly at this point.
- People simply were not gripped enough to care about UFC 115 being Chuck Liddell’s last fight. Money talks and BS walks and people largely spoke with their wallets. They just paid for UFC 114 and will pay for UFC 116 with Brock Lesnar. UFC 115 was doomed to begin with.
- The card largely was irrelevant in terms of the future matchmaking of most of UFC’s divisions. Evan Dunham’s performance over Tyson Griffin was the result that meant the most coming out of the card and fans got to see that on Spike TV for free.
The ultimate irony in this argument is that one week ago on the MMA Nation radio show, Luke Thomas desperately tried to solicit calls from listeners to talk about UFC 115 and he struggled to find any takers. One person called in and asked “why Kimbo Slice sucked in the UFC” and the floodgates opened. It’s not that the message didn’t get out, it’s that not many people cared enough about UFC 115 to buy it.
I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you the rest.
Now, the second passage from the MMA Nation radio show last night. It has to deal with UFC’s marketing team picking favorites on who to push and how to have the announcers push them.
CHAD DUKES: “I want to spend a little bit of time also on the first fight that we saw that evening, Carlos Condit and he fought Rory MacDonald, another one of these young smooth boys with a six-pack that the UFC’s pushing and then Mike Goldberg fawns all over. If you’ve got dreamy abs and you’re below the age of 24, Mike Goldberg is going to slurp you on the air. Did you notice that last night?”
CO-HOST: “Of course, of course, of course. It’s getting harder and harder to believe everything that he says the more he you know he claims that a 20-year old guy with abs is the future of Mixed Martial Arts.”
CHAD DUKES: “That is the phrase, and look, I like that guy, I think he does a good job.”
CO-HOST: “He did really well.”
CHAD DUKES: “I think Joe Rogan does a good job. I’m talking about Goldberg. I think they’ve got a pretty damn good commentary team there and I’ve tried my hand at it once with Luke (Thomas), it’s very difficult to do, I understand that. But if I heard ‘This is the future of MMA!’ one more time, after I heard it 100 times when Todd Duffee was in the cage and got knocked out by a guy that looks like me with his shirt off, I was going to throw up and that’s why I think that really pump your brakes when you see a guy that’s [being pushed]. I mean we saw it with Gegard Mousasi. Gegard Mousasi was the next big thing, he was unbeatable, he was this young phenom and what happened? He got put on his back and he lost his belt and that’s what happens to a lot of these guys and that’s why I was very excited to see Condit win. Not only because I like Carlos Condit, I’ve liked him every since he was in the WEC and we met the guy and he’s really nice, but I think he’s a damn good fighter and I think for him to pick up that win is great for him but it is frustrating that most of the coverage was not about Condit getting that win but it was about Rory MacDonald.”
CO-HOST: “I think that was probably because you know he’s only 20 years old, right?”
CHAD DUKES: “Right, of course, the young phenom. Everybody loves the young phenom.”
CO-HOST: “But regardless, that’s not a phrase you can’t throw around like that. You can’t just say ‘oh this guy is the future of the UFC’ or anything like that…”
CHAD DUKES: “But that’s what they’ve been doing.”
CO-HOST: “Because seldom times do they ever actually work out to being you know that, I guess it’s happened with Jon Jones, that’s the one guy I’ve you know I’ve seen all the commentators predict that he was going to be really great and you know he’s actually came through and you know obviously he’s great now.”
CHAD DUKES: “Jon Jones, I mean, he looks to be a juggernaut. We’ll see what happens as he climbs the ranks in that division I mean that’s a murderer’s row he’s going to go through but look, I think Rory MacDonald, first of all he showed a tremendous amount of class, like he really really handled himself well and the crowd was all over Condit and I think he was very gracious in defeat. I don’t dislike the kid; I think he has a tremendous career. I’m just saying that it’s frustrating the way that the UFC sometimes approaches some of these and it all seems to be all young, smooth, good-looking boys. Well, that’s what it is! Isn’t it?”
CO-HOST: “It’s hard to say bad things about…”
CHAD DUKES: “It’s hairless men with six-packs, that’s what it is. And it’s weird!”
CO-HOST: “I saw your tweet yesterday, apparently all the coverage is about him and they’re completely ignoring the fact that Condit won.”
CHAD DUKES: “That Carlos Condit won and Carlos Condit is a couple of decisions, a couple of falls away from having a very good record in the UFC. I think that guy’s a great fighter.”
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 9 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
“If you’ve got dreamy abs and you’re below the age of 24, Mike Goldberg is going to slurp you on the air.”
I’ve never, ever noticed or thought that Goldberg did that. Is this guy projecting something?
seems that way
Chad Dukes is a radio personality. He says dumb stuff to get a rise out of people. No offense to Zach(or anyone else on here), but Dukes is much more of a pro wrestling guy than MMA.
He is Fluyid.
Chad Dukes is an a$$h0le. That’s one of the only reasons he’s on the radio. He’s a very opinionated guy, who goes off on tangents all the time.
Aside from being “seasonal”, the other aspect about that is that no one knows what the value of any given NFL game is prior to the start of the season. Meanwhile, a fighter’s career is not booked 16 fights in advance. Cro-Cop is still Cro-Cop. Beating a midtier prospect doesn’t change that.
Promoter promotes silky smooth, young, marketable, athletic prospects to males and females in 18-34 demo. News at eleven.
If he came from Pro Wrestling he must not have been paying attention to what he was watching. Or is he just a body-conscious mark?
lol.
Who cares what Chad Dukes says? That is the long short of things.
Even for a Bloody Elbow writer this guy is painfully ignorant.
As Zach pointed out there are 10,000 holes in this idiotic argument. #1 being an off season that the NFL has. If the UFC ran from September through January and then took February through August off (5 months on, 7 months off) then they could run a show every week if they wanted and it wouldn’t be in the same ballpark as the level of overkill they get running 12 months a year.
The NFL doesn’t get a burn out because 1) the regular season games build up to playoffs and you get far more of an emotional investment that way in wins and losses since MMA doesn’t guarantee anything from wins and losses. and 2) even if you are burned out by the time the Super Bowl finishes, you’re certainly excited to even watch pre-season games by August because you’ve had nothing.
Also the crappy games (say Browns at Titans for example) would not get more than regional coverage. If you don’t live in Ohio or Tennessee, CBS wouldn’t be dumb enough to air it in your area unless a game ends earlier than they expected and they cut to it to kill time. They air the two best games of their timeslot between the hot teams for the majority of the country unless their regional team is playing.
As for the “Goldberg and UFC like to put over hunky fighters” crap, that’s ridiculous. Junior Dos Santos is one ugly human being and he’ll probably be in line to headline the next HW title fight. There’s no doubt they do make sure good looking fighters get lots of airtime (aka “The Roger Huerta Experiment”) but that’s everything televised. Even the NFL makes sure players popular with the ladies like Tom Brady and Reggie Bush gets lots of sideline shots not wearing their helmets. But it has nothing to do with their accomplishments. They wouldn’t put them in the Super Bowl if they sucked just to get more ratings, nor would UFC hand out a title shot to an attractive fighter if he didn’t earn it.
On both counts, Dukes needs to think before he speaks next time.
The thing is Mark, Dukes isn’t a bloody-elbow writer. He is a Radio talkshow host. He’s kinda famous in the D.C. area for his 2-6 show with Lavaar Arrington.