I was a diehard for a long time too. The sport passed me by after a while. I came into the sport with Chuck head kicked Babalu. I probably watched just about every fight after that one for a long time. After a while, I'd skip a card here and there. A longer while still, and I'd be skipping 3 or 4 cards in a row.
On and on and now I don't know half the names on the cards. People pretend to be nostalgic about "back in the day" when you'd know every single fighter on a card. The sport hasn't changed, we have. Sure, it's harder to keep up with. More and more cards every year.
But we're not "diehards" anymore. If we were, this wouldn't be the case.
There definitely aren't as many diehards as there used to be. I highly doubt the UFC is bringing in any new diehards these days. Just holding on to the few they've still got. It just doesn't seem like it's a reminiscing thing where people act like everything was better "back in the day" even though it hasn't changed.
To me it came down to 3 things.
1. Stars. Chuck, Brock, Anderson, Tito, Couture, Rampage, GSP, Hughes, Penn etc etc. These guys were household names. A few years back the UFC survived on a couple of megastars in Ronda and McGregor but now they have almost no stars. I guess Jon Jones is the closest thing that still fights but he was never the draw that the real stars were. They also had a ton of secondary stars back then like Shogun, Hendo, Franklin, Griffin, Rashad, Machida etc. Hell, there were more names in the LHW division back then than there is in the entire UFC right now.
2. Watered down cards. We've already talked about this.
3. The fall of TUF. Back when the TUF tournaments were full of quality fighters, they would fill up even the "weak" cards. So a random Fight Night card back in the day would be really weak compared to a PPV card but the "filler" on those cards were guys like Lauzon, Leben, Guillard, Diaz, Lytle etc. Guys that were still up and coming but had their brand built because of TUF.
I think losing the "brand" of the fighters is an underrated reason because it's kind of like watching a sport while not knowing who anyone is. It's boring. I always get my girlfriends into sports by telling them things about the players. Once they start to know who the players are and random things about them, they start enjoying the sport because it gives it some sort of meaning other than watching a bunch of guys randomly try and get a ball in a hoop or a football in an end zone.
