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Ultimate Fleecing
UFC’s deal with Fox was supposed to secure its future. So why is the premier mixed-martial-arts promotion in such bad shape?

By Tim Marchman and Tomas Rios

121206_SN_DanaWhite.jpg.CROP.rectangle3-large.jpg


Posted Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012, at 4:34 PM ET
President of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Dana White.
Dana White, president of the UFC.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.



If you have a television, and that television receives one of the many stations owned by Fox, you’ve probably seen the ads. On Saturday! There will be fights! Benson Henderson! Will be defending his lightweight title! Against Nate Diaz! B.J. Penn! Will be fighting! Rory MacDonald! There are clips of men punching other men, and torquing their limbs as grandiose music plays. The Ultimate Fighting Championship is on Fox!

If you’re like the vast majority of television owners, none of this means anything to you. Building a sport is not quick work, and so the fact that the UFC—not long ago a barely legal fringe concern—hardly registers with the general public is unsurprising. What is surprising is that, just more than a year after the UFC signed a major rights deal with Fox, its business appears to be in a dangerous downturn. The UFC, it seems, was quite literally not ready for prime time.

“That’s all bullshit,” says UFC president Dana White of any suggestion that his company looks a bit like a deer pinned under a lion. “That’s all bullshit. There’s a bunch of shit out there on the Internet, when you listen to all the crock of shit out there with people who have no fucking clue what they’re talking about.”

The facts, though, read like this. UFC’s Fox debut last November averaged an impressive 5.7 million viewers. Its last two offerings, by contrast, both drew an average viewership of about 2.4 million. The current season of The Ultimate Fighter reality show has averaged 835,000 viewers for FX on Friday nights, a huge decline from past seasons. And sales of the UFC’s pay-per-view cards are all but guaranteed to decline for a second straight year, from an estimated 9.27 million PPV buys of 16 events in 2010, to 6.49 million buys of 16 events in 2011, to 5.28 million buys of 12 events in 2012 with one card yet to air.

There are a variety of explanations for all of this. Eric Shanks, the president of Fox Sports, cites communication issues between Fox, FX, and Fuel, the three main stations running UFC content, the difficulty of finding a proper format in which to present an event-driven sport, and “confusion in the marketplace” caused by Spike, former home of the UFC, continuing to run old fights on what seems like a constant loop. Dana White points to an unprecedented string of injuries to top fighters this year—“Eight out of 12 main events fell out. That’s 67 per cent! That’s crazy! That’s unheard of!”—as well as top heavyweight draw Brock Lesnar’s departure for pro wrestling.

Still, the simplest and most logical explanation for the decline is this: The UFC has been running lousy shows. Until fairly recently, White could rightly claim that his fight cards were a better deal than those put on by boxing promoters. At that point, he was taking advantage of UFC’s virtual monopoly on top mixed martial artists, staging main events that fans clamored to see and undercards with another two, three, or four interesting bouts. Lately, though, top stars like Jon Jones and Anderson Silva have been fighting walking speedbags like Vitor Belfort and Stephan Bonnar, while spent fighters who should have retired years ago, such as Tito Ortiz and Ant
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(Continued from Page 1)

Fox has UFC on the hook for six more years and, says White, “we’re probably going to be on there for the next 16 years,” so none of this is going to change any time soon. It may seem illogical for Fox to keep whipping the horse, but the fact is that the UFC deal is a small gamble for them. If the UFC somehow rises to the occasion, Fox controls an entire sport; if it continues its decline, Fox still has a well of cheap live programming that can at least hit target demographic numbers. There is no losing scenario for Fox in this deal, and that’s how you know the UFC is in over its head.

As deep and abiding as the UFC’s problems are, fixing them is hardly impossible. It’s unclear, though, if White is the man to do it. “The reality is,” he says, “we are one of the major sports. We’re on a network that carries the NFL, we’re on a network that carries Major League Baseball.” That’s true, but the man often doesn’t act as if he knows it.

Imagine if the combined id of every dickish sports commissioner were given free reign, and you’ve conjured Dana White. There is no slight too small to set him off, no common courtesy too sacred for him to ignore. A run of his greatest hits would include him calling veteran MMA reporter Loretta Hunt a “dumb bitch,” denying media credentials to major outlets for inscrutable reasons, and blindly defending employees who mirror his own at-times repulsive behavior. How, for instance, does he square the company’s attempts to expand business in Brazil with his decision to push middleweight Chael Sonnen—infamous for borderline racist invective against Brazilians—as one of the faces of the company?

“Hey, this is the fight business. And to ask somebody like me? I’m the wrong guy to ask that,” says White. “I think everybody in this country are a bunch of pussies anyway. I’m tired of all the politically correct bullshit.

“Welcome to the real world. Sometimes people say mean things.”

White is plenty likable—it would be pretty great if David Stern responded to critics by saying, “People are fucking stupid and say dumb shit”— and as responsible as anyone else for the fact that the UFC has increased in value from the $2 million his childhood friends Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta paid for it in 2001 to a presently unknown but presumably enormous sum. (The company is privately held, but last fall, Lorenzo Fertitta claimed UFC was worth more than Manchester United or the New York Yankees.) And for what it’s worth, the president of Fox Sports professes not to mind having White around. “Look, there are colorful characters in any sport,” says Shanks. “And they’re people. People say dumb things all the time. How many times do politicians have to apologize for silly things, or awful things, that they say?”

The man who leads his tribe out of the desert, though, isn’t necessarily the one to lead them to the promised land. You wouldn’t be out of line, for instance, in seeing a connection between White comfortably calling Americans “a bunch of pussies” and his company’s inability to attract a stable of big-ticket advertisers.

For those who’d prefer their cage fighting to be controlled by someone more high-minded, there is always the prospect—which White completely, emphatically denies—that the Fertittas might look to cash out of what increasingly looks like a bubble economy in sports. Of course, there is no guarantee that a sale would mark the end of White’s tenure as president, or that a buyer wouldn’t share White’s collection of obnoxious rich guy quirks. So the promotion’s many problems are likely to continue, unless something drastic happens.

The UFC’s path mirrors the history of combat sports on television, which in Japan as well as America has played out as a recursive loop. Boxing, kickboxing, or MMA gets hot. Network executives notice, and in collaboration with promoters, they run so much of it that it starts to bleed together in a great blur of static that sounds like “Henderson title Fuel bro Penn fights Fox, I have other things to do on a Saturday.” For all the technique, grace, and style that make fighting, at its best, a beautiful and satisfying sport—and this Saturday’s card should be an excellent showcase of all that and more—it carries a limited and fragile appeal. The UFC, as White likes to say, isn’t going anywhere. That’s true, but not only in the way he means it.
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Tomas Rios? bahahahaha
Dude is so annoying and the biggest hater.
 
IMO, the UFC tries waaaay to hard to impress the casual viewers (fuck them).

They need to stop with all the BS marketing and cater to it's hardcore fans.

Youre either in or outside the fence(pun intended).
 
"White is plenty likable—it would be pretty great if David Stern responded to critics by saying, “People are fucking stupid and say dumb shit”—

David Stern basically says that for something he does every year. Definitely did after the Spurs fine situation.
 
So two of MMA's biggest derps got together to write an article. I'm supposed to be surprised it has a negative slant?
 
nice hit piece by terrible writers.
 
BionicCommando said:
So two of MMA's biggest derps got together to write an article. I'm supposed to be surprised it has a negative slant?
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Isnt the Tim guy the one who writes the anti UFC pieces for SI?
 
The UFC is not in bad shape, and neither is MMA.

Between FOX and Globo, more people are watching UFC events than ever before.

Bellator is on SPIKE, the UFC is on three different channels and then there's AXS fights on top of that.
 
"by tomas rios"

no thank you...dude is bonkers, easily the worst sherdog contributer, AND the worst roundtable participant...his picks were retarded and embarrassing
 
Some interesting points but damn that article needed to get to them quicker. The interesting points are heavily outnumbered by redundant shite though.

The idea that Fox benefits no matter what is scary.
 
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Why is this being posted now? This was done and posted a month ago why is it being brought back up? I guess I answered my own question.
 
Team imperial said:
Saw Tomas Rios.




Didn't read
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Well thought out response. Honestly, though, I can't blame you on that one. Rios is one of the biggest known UFC haters, and any article written by him is inevitably going to be filled with his bias.
 
5Rounder said:
Well thought out response. Honestly, though, I can't blame you on that one. Rios is one of the biggest known UFC haters, and any article written by him is inevitably going to be filled with his bias.
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disregard him being a ufc hater even...his old ufc previews were laughable, and his writing is trash
 
Rios is a joke. If you're going to pretend to be a writer, pretend to use correct grammar and punctuation, dipshit. Further, some of these "quotes" sound like something his buddy said while drinking.
 
My opinion is that the next Fox card will see a boost in ratings if its well placed and features fights that deliver. The last card was pretty exciting (despite that the main event was just a five round one sided beating) and people are discussing it much more commonly than events 2-4.
 
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