UFC/MMA Thread

[DennyMcLain]

Chuck Liddell on Dancing With The Stars!!!! This shits gonna be next level. Those judges are gonna be shitting their panties when it comes time to score his moves.

[Pharaoh]

Kdawg: Welcome to an essay...

Dana White and his business partners don't think Lesnar is a fucking joke. They KNOW he's the golden goose!

While Raw was on commercial last week did anyone switch and watch the UFC show on Spike? I know plenty of people did. The ratings prove it. And that was the plan - using Lesnar's name and past wrestling success to get new fans. And those are fans tired of Raw being shit.

And Dana certainly wanted to attract pro wrestling fans - he was extremely smart, unlike Vince McMahon during the 1990's. See, WWF went through the major boom of the mid-1980's, hooked a ton of kids on their product and then maintained the status quo.

For the next fucking 10 years!!!

McMahon didn't realise this at the time but I bet in hindsight he's kicking himself. That 10 year old grew up and got sick of the cartoon wrestling. Paul Heyman knew that - which is why ECW was rising until WCW and WWE took his ideas and did them on a much bigger sclae (and budget).

Now where is this going?

Vince won the wrestling war, went corporate and has toned down the shows to a large extent. We're moving back to the cartoon shit. The kids that were 10-16 when the Attitude Era hit are now in their late 20's and quite simply - WWE doesn't do it for them.

The wrestling fans that were kids in the 1980's? Some are still around - but they're now over 35 years old. Still the target demographic and likely sick and tired of WWE being shit/TNA shooting itself in the foot.

TNA has failed to capitalise on Vince's latest stupidity but Dana White was paying attention back in the mid 1990's and he's doing an Eric Bischoff all over Vince McMahon.

White took Lesnar and pushed him to the moon. Lesnar didn't deserve his title shot - but he got one because White saw dollar signs, serious dollar signs.

You see, back in the day when Monday Nitro and WWE Raw went head to head the combined wrestling rating was approx 9.0!!! Obviously many of those fans don't watch anymore.

What are they watching?

Not all of them are watching or spending money on UFC/MMA - but a lot of them probably are. When WWE claims MMA attracts a "different" audience than they do ("UFC is sport, we're entertainment") they're not really lying. A lot of the fans MMA/UFC attract are former wrestling fans that have given up watching WWE cause it sucks.

There might be market research to dispute that claim or even back it up, I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that all those millions of people that used to watch Nitro and Raw no longer do. They watch something else.

And it is my belief that a person that gets hooked on wrestling and watches it long term (WCW beat Raw for 83 weeks in a row while the numbers were huge) isn't all of a sudden gonna switch off and stick to movies or sitcoms.

Those people wanna see conflict. They wanna see the "fight". UFC got hot long before Lesnar came in - I'm not disputing that. And I'm not saying he's the best fighter or the ONLY guy bringing in viewers.

What I am saying is that when Lesnar is on PPV or on TV Dana White has a way in to all those disenfranchised wrestling fans that are sick of bullshit stories, sick of fake looking fights and sick of all the lame promos.

White is showing them what wrestling used to be way back when. And people are eating it up. UFC pay per views are killing it in the US domestic market while WWE's buyrates have fallen by over 10%!!!

UFC has hit over 1 million buys in the domestic market at least 3 times in the past year. WWE can barely hit 1 million worldwide for Mania!

UFC is huge. Lesnar is bringing in a big audience. Other dudes in UFC are too. Good for all of them. And someone needs to praise Dana White and his crew cause they are kicking ass.

They're also providing hope to long time wrestling fans who wish that TNA or WWE would wake the fuck up and book the shows in a much more realistic way. With UFC kicking ass and Smackdown the far superior wrestling tv show one would thin TNA heads and Vince would see what the fuck is going on...

[El CHUPACABRA]

Actually, the whole MMA world thinks Lesnar is a fucking joke. All Brock Lesnar has done for MMA has brought the wrestling world's biggest douche bags to bars, MMA events, and MMA gyms. These are the fans Dana White and the UFC didn't want to attract. MMA companies like the UFC don't want aren't trying to attract the occasional wrestling fan who expects to see a stone cold stunner or a people's elbow inside the cage. They want to be as unassociated with "professional wrestling" as possible.

Really? That's weird because Lesnar has been continously beating the shit out of the best fighters in his division. I hate him as much as the next guy but I can clearly see that the MMA world doesn't think he's a "fucking joke".

And I'm sure Dana White is really bummed about the hundreds of thousands of subscriptions that Brock Lesnar has added to his PPVs.

[kdawg32086]

Really? That's weird because Lesnar has been continously beating the shit out of the best fighters in his division. I hate him as much as the next guy but I can clearly see that the MMA world doesn't think he's a "fucking joke".

And I'm sure Dana White is really bummed about the hundreds of thousands of subscriptions that Brock Lesnar has added to his PPVs.

Lesnar is beating them using power and brute force, rather than skill. After the Mir fight, quite a few pro fighters came out and expressed concerns about pro wrestling guys coming in and hurting the credibility of the sport. MMA has always been about technique and skill being able to overcome strength advantages. Lesnar disproved it in the Mir fight. The only technique he used was his takedowns. Everything else was just brute force pinning Mir down and punching him. If the MMA world doesn't think he's a joke, then I dunno what you would call the fans on sherdog and mixed martial arts.com, as well as writers for mmanews.com and five ounces of pain. Thats as close to the MMA world as you can get. When people like that are bashing the guy regularly, I don't think we can say the MMA world takes him seriously.

Pharaoh, Lesnar might have huge PPV buys but he's not exactly creating a new fan base for MMA with wrestling fans unless they're watching more than just the Lesnar ppv's. If the other events aren't attracting those fans, then Lesnar is nothing more than a get rich quick scheme that Dana White will exploit. And as of now, that is the case.

[El CHUPACABRA]

That's a bunch of bullshit. He's beating the hell out of guys. It's called mixed martial arts, you can't knock the guy because he's fluent in wrestling and GnP and strong.

[kdawg32086]

It's just dumb that he gets to fight guys who weigh 30-50 pounds less than him and just pin them down and hit them. The weight difference between Lesnar and Mir on fight night was over 30 pounds(could have been as high as 50, depending on how much weight Brock gained by re-hydrating). That's like BJ Penn going in to try to fight a Dan Henderson or Nate Marquardt. It just kind of defeats the point of weight classes. They need to get Lesnar out of the 265 weight class and make him fight at super heavyweight or they should lower the heavyweight limit to at least make it competitive. There's nothing exciting about a dude with a penis tattooed on his chest taking someone down, pinning them down using nothing but brute strength, and hitting them. Sorry, that's not MMA. It's a joke. That's why everyone thinks pro wrestling is bullshit now because it's all these giant roided out dudes beating up on littler guys(except wrestling isn't real fighting).

[Pharaoh]

Kdawg: It sounds like you're more upset about the way Lesnar fights than anything else he does.

Obviously no one wants to see some giant beat up a little dude (like if Khali destroyed Evan Bourne for example) and weight classes are supposed to help the MMA avoid the mis-matches.

However, rules are rules and if Lesnar qualifies at a certain weight then he gets to fight at that weight. Surely Lesnar is not the only guy barely making weight and then "re-hydrating" after the weigh-in?

Lesnar might have huge PPV buys but he's not exactly creating a new fan base for MMA with wrestling fans unless they're watching more than just the Lesnar ppv's. If the other events aren't attracting those fans, then Lesnar is nothing more than a get rich quick scheme that Dana White will exploit. And as of now, that is the case.

Is that the case, kdwag?

Are you sure?

Where are you getting your buyrate numbers from?

Since UFC is not a publicly traded company they don't have to report PPV buys (unlike WWE). However it is generally accepted that UFC 100 did more than 1.5 million buys!!!

That's not a typo.

The reason everyone thinks (knows) it did more than 1.5 million is because Dana White stated he would bungee jump off Mandalay Bay Casino if the buys were that high. UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta has since claimed that White will have to "base jump" off the Casino!

Obviously UFC 100 was headlined by Lesnar v Mir but what about UFC 92? I think Griffin v Evans and Mir v Nogueira headlined the card and apparently it drew somewhere close to 1 million buys.

UFC 91 with Lesnar v Couture is verified at 920,000 buys

UFC 94 with Penn v St. Pierre 2 was over the million mark again!

So, 2 shows headlined with Lesnar got near or over the million mark and 2 shows he wasn't on also got close to or over the million mark too.

Conclusion: The PPV buys are not all about Lesnar. It's about the UFC promoting the big fights well and their fans (new and old) paying to see them.

FWIW, UFC 93 was a UK based event, always suicide for ppv due to the time difference. Slammed between 2 major shows and airing live in the afternoon didn't help the buyrate either. It was tracking at 320,000 buys back in February, which is amazing when you consider that WWE's Royal Rumble will be lucky to exceed that number despite it being the official start on the "Road to Wrestlemania".

[Pharaoh]

BTW, the reason people hate wrestling now isn't because of the roided up freaks. That's been happening for years.

It's the same old, same old main events.

Cena, Triple H, Orton, Batista, Shawn Michaels, Undertaker and Edge have all been main eventing WWE for the last 3-5 years.

Some like Taker, Michaels and HHH have been in the spotlight for a decade or more!

Yet a guy like MVP or Christian or Jack Swagger can't make it into the mix? Or Evan Bourne? All those guys are "over" and with the right story could be pushed into the main event.

Put none of those guys are on Smackdown - where they know Taker is a part timer and they need to build/elevate new stars. Like Punk and Morrison.

(And notice how Morrison and Punk got over? Via Jeff Hardy - not a real legit Main Event Player like Michaels or Cena or Orton)

Once those SD guys are considered legit main eventers they will move to Raw, where Triple H and his veteran buddies will destroy them while Smackdown rebuilds Swagger and Christian and MVP and Bourne.

Then we'll switch them back and repeat the cycle again. It's fucked.

At least TNA is bat shit crazy. You can laugh at their stupidity at times but you can also be thankful they have different stars like Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, Hernandez, Eric Young and Matt Morgan, who aren't over-exposed.

[kdawg32086]

http://www.sherdog.net/forums/f2/his...100-a-1036536/

Here's a link on sherdog of the buyrates. I didn't check every single one, but I googled UFC 85 through 100 and the liddell-ortiz one and they're accurate. A couple of the events(UFC 91) there was confusion among the links I found about the real numbers.

UFC 92, the supposed best card to date in UFC history (Forrest-Rashad, Rampag-Wanderlei, Nog-Mir). Brock Lesnar has yet to be on a ppv with less than a 625k buyrate. And thats with events like UFC 91 that had awful cards surrounding the main attraction. That's more than UFC 79, the event that featured Liddell-Wanderlei. Outside of super stacked cards, Lesnar's events are the top selling.


But again, UFC needs to develop the sport, rather than trying to become like pro wrestling. They became mainstream because they avoided taking the same route as WWE and the pro wrestling industry. The UFC and other MMA companies are gonna die off once the cash cow Lesnar retires unless they can develop a fan base who will put up consistently high buyrates, even when they can't completely stack the shit out of an event.

[El CHUPACABRA]

Pharaoh, to be fair, all of the GSP fights sell high because it's one of the few things Canadians have going for them.