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By: Shawn Ennis, MMATorch Senior Columnist
This article was originally posted on Thursday, Sept. 6
I've done a lot of thinking over the past couple of weeks since UFC 151 was cancelled (or since the sport was killed by Greg Jackson – take your pick). It's led to a lot of tongue-wagging and keyboard-clacking (I've done my share of both) about what the UFC needs to do in order to ensure that this sort of thing doesn't happen again – quit putting on so many shows, make sure you've got a co-main that can sell a card, and so on and so on. But what is the real reason that UFC 151 was cancelled? I think it's something that could account for a lot of the UFC's woes: lack of predictability.
On the surface, I will admit that this makes no sense. What does predictability have to do with anything? PPV buys are slowing down, ratings are not exactly a bonanza on FX or Fox (which is not as big a deal as some are making it out to be; or at least not yet), and we just don't have the same kind of buzz around the UFC as we had a couple of years ago. A good deal of this is because more is expected of a sport when it becomes more popular. People are attracted by the spectacle, but you've got to give them a reason to stick around. People want to know what they're getting, when they're getting it, and what they can expect.
We're not talking about fight results here. That's a different story. The heart of the matter is that there is no discernible pattern for the UFC's events or its fighters. How many times should champions defend their titles? Is this or that interim champion going to wait until the actual champion is healthy before fighting? Who is the number one contender? Is this a title eliminator fight? These are questions that viewers should never have to ask. This is not the first time the preceding questions have been addressed in this space, but they remain largely unanswered over a year later.
Solving the issue of predictability wouldn't just be good for fans. It would be almost the equivalent of Henry Ford using interchangeable parts. If the main-eventer goes down, there's either another fighter or another fight ready to step in or be shifted to a different event. So let's look at how this could go down.
The questions we want to answer with this scheduling system are the same ones posed above. Therefore, one has to approach the issue with those queries in mind. First, the number of times a champion should fight. Looking at last year and this year (including fights that are scheduled but haven't happened yet), most titles were defended twice annually, including interim title bouts. The exceptions are the Bantamweight, Flyweight and Middleweight Titles in 2012 (each defended/contested once), the Heavyweight and Welterweight Titles in 2011 (defended once), and the Light Heavyweight Title in 2011 (defended thrice). So let's just set a standard right now that the champion defends his title semi-annually.
With that question answered, we would need to look at when these defenses would take place. With the addition of the Flyweight Title at UFC 152, the UFC will have a total of eight weight classes. That makes for a total of 16 title defenses, meaning that there should be a title fight in every calendar month, with four months boasting two title fights. With this being the case, a schedule of defenses would have to exist in order to provide some visibility to the fans about which title is being defended in which months. The reason you do this is to give people something to anticipate.
On that note, we need to have an aside. The thing that many people forget when analyzing the UFC's successes and shortcomings with ticket sales and PPV buys is that every event isn't going to be a blockbuster. Actually it's impossible by definition. If every event is huge, that means that no event is huge. They're all the same size. They're all normal. A promotion shouldn't want to have every event get the same amount of interest. If every event garners the same amount of anticipation, you've lost the ability to have big fights and attract new fans – not just the ones who show up every month.
So what does all this have to do with a schedule? It's simple. If people know what events are going to feature the fighters in whom they are interested, those are the events to which they'll look forward. It doesn't necessarily mean that they will or won't watch the fights in between – it just means that they definitely will watch the one where their favorite fighter is featured. If a promotion has that dynamic, it prevents the situation in which an Anderson Silva fan watches him fight in January, then somehow misses his next fight and realizes the world didn't end, and he's less likely to come back to the product.
Just for the sake of example, let's put together a schedule of defenses. This will be based on the schedule for the rest of 2012.
This schedule would be posted on the UFC's website and they would reference it frequently throughout the year – whether it's during events while hyping next month's lineups, on UFC Tonight, during desk segments before and after events, etc. It should be common knowledge. One should be able to get a schedule magnet with this information like the kinds available for NFL teams. However it's done, the basic idea is that it should be promoted. And the great thing about it is that if a champion decides that he can fight again before his next scheduled defense, that wouldn't be a problem. For example, if Anderson Silva just fought in July, he knows he's fighting again in January. If he thinks he can pull off another fight in October, great. It just gives the UFC another title fight to promote. The point is, title defenses happen at defined times. They are appointments.
Of course, that brings up the ugly subject of injuries. There are two ways to look at injuries. Let's say that Dominick Cruz injures himself and can't make the June title defense, but he can do it in August. The easy answer is to either push the lightweight or middleweight title to June or pull the heavyweight or middleweight defense up a month. No harm, no foul. You've still got a title fight in each month. You just have to make sure that it's promoted. And of course, now you've got two defenses scheduled for August.
But in the case of a severe injury, everyone's favorite subject rears its ugly head: interim titles. To me, there's no real way around this. Maybe you dress it up as something different – if you're publicizing the names of the number one contenders, you don't necessarily need an interim belt. You can just say that Fighter A puts his number one contender status on the line against Fighter B when they meet at this or that event. Or maybe the interim belt looks different from the regular belt. Maybe it's silver or something. Whatever the difference, it can be attended to.
So let's say, for example, Dominick Cruz is injured before his title defense, and he's going to be out for a long time. In this case, the title challenger fights the next guy down the ladder for the interim belt (or number one contender status – whatever we're calling it now). But when the fight is over, there's no question of whether the interim champion is going to wait for Cruz to heal. He's going to defend his status at the next scheduled title defense. If Cruz isn't ready in January, the interim champ is fighting whomever is next in line. No questions asked.
And what about contender fights, by the way? Right now, the title eliminator is a loosely-defined thing, promising this or that fighter a chance at being "in the mix" for a title shot. This is insanity. There's no way, going into an event, that fighters and fans should not know what's on the line when two top fighters are scheduled to clash.
The first part of the equation in title eliminators is transparency in rankings. I can't imagine that Joe Silva is just sitting at his desk looking at a bunch of fighters' pictures and throwing darts. He's got to have a ranking system of some sort. Whether it's a definite, numbered system or a more loosely-defined tiered system, there has to be some visual way of separating contenders from the rest of the division. Why not make that information public? They've toyed with it on Fox broadcasts before, but it should be something that is publicized heavily. Rankings give fights more meaning. If you know that this is the number four and number six fighters in the division going at it, that means something more than just having two guys I've heard of a few times having a fight for some unknown ramifications. So in order for this to really work, rankings have to be transparent.
With a number one contender fight, there are a couple of ways to approach it. I maintain that the fights should take place in the same month as the title defenses, but not necessarily at the same event. The UFC could use title eliminators as television main events pretty easily as long as they are publicized as definite title eliminators and not "well, whoever looks good will be in the mix right now for a title shot." If we know that the main event of the FX card definitely has a title shot on the line, it makes the event that much more marketable, and it leads more organically into the pay-per-view event that would ideally happen on the following weekend. Of course, the other school of thought would be to have the number one contender fights on the same card as the title fights. In principle this would work as it flows well, but it leaves one with fewer choices to use in coming up with television main events. The other side of the coin, of course, is to have the months with two title defenses feature a title fight and title eliminator fight on a television card in addition to a pay-per-view event. Either one is doable.
Looking at the UFC's schedule, there are a total of 31 events scheduled to run in 2012. Pay-per-view events make up 14 of those, with seven FX cards (including two TUF Finales), six Fuel cards and four Fox cards. The problem with this model right now is that when one looks at the calendar, it appears as though the events were shot from a shotgun; scattered with no rhyme or reason throughout the year. There were two PPVs in February but none in March. There were FX events in January and March, then none until June, in which there were two, and then none again until October. The approach to scheduling should be much more organized.
What needs to happen with UFC events is that they have to become appointments. We've already discussed that as a principle with title fights, but it should apply in a more general sense to all UFC cards. Fans should never have to wonder when the next show is. For example:
A typical month would contain either two or three UFC events, depending on whether a Fox card was happening during that month. The FX or Fuel card would happen during the second-to-last weekend of the month, and the pay-per-view would happen on the last weekend of the month. If a Fox card were to be scheduled in a given month, the FX or Fuel card would be pushed back to two weeks before the pay-per-view so as to allow the Fox card to be the driver for more PPV buys.
What's being proposed here only takes into account the UFC's current distribution deal. I'm using six events for FX (I couldn't find how TUF fits into that schedule or if it's considered a separate entity from the "Fight Night" cards), six for Fuel, and four for Fox. I'm also proposing that the UFC never run more than one pay-per-view event during a calendar month, and that they always fall on the same weekend. Again, for predictability. If the event happens to fall on the same night as another big event, so be it. When you're running this many shows, you can't be concerned with what everyone else is doing. If you make it a habit for people to watch UFC pay-per-views on the last weekend of the month, you're fostering a behavior that's bound to make your business more profitable, regardless of other events. You don't want fans to have to look up when the next pay-per-view event is. They should already know.
As you may guess by reading this, I don't subscribe to the theory that the UFC is running too many events. In fact, depending on what their goals are, they may need to run more (see note at the end of the column). The problem with UFC events right now is that they're all supposed to be huge. Nothing is defined down to allow bigger events to be bigger. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's true. Every event for the UFC is marketed as meaning something, but it's not obvious what that something is. So the UFC bills each card as "FIGHTS TONIGHT!!!! Who's gonna win and move up to the mix?! Who takes a step back?! FIREWORKS!!!" We need storylines to sell cards. I'm not talking about manufactured drama – I'm talking about addressing the real ramifications of wins and losses before the fight happens. The UFC has an unbelievable production department. If you've been to a live event and seen the "Baba O'Reilly" videos, you know what I'm talking about. It wouldn't be a big issue for them to produce a similar video for the next month's worth of events that could be shown during the current month's crop of shows. It would sure beat Mike Goldberg's canned, "Here's what's coming up..."
These suggestions are the tip of the iceberg for what the UFC could do to make their shows more enticing to viewers. Sure, they want to expand and be a global phenomenon, and that's all well and good. But before you start taking over the world, you should probably make sure your own house is in order.
Note: MMATorch attempted to contact the UFC for information on how they determine the number of events to run, how they determine the ideal roster size, whether roster size drives number of events or vice versa, whether they plan on expanding the number of events in their distribution deal or whether they plan on pursuing other avenues of distribution, and a few other questions. They did not answer our request for comment on these matters.
Questions? Comments? Hit me up on Twitter - @shawnennis, shoot me an email – ennistorch(at)gmail.com, or leave a comment below.
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