Victor Decolongon - Getty Images
Dana White's UFC will oppose the Floyd Mayweather Jr pay-per-view with a show on Fox on May 5. (Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images)
Floyd Mayweather Jr won't be the only combat sports attraction on American TV on May 5, as the UFC has scheduled their third network television show on Fox for that evening.
The UFC show will feature lightweights (155 lbs.) Nate Diaz and Jim Miller in a fight that has UFC fans extremely excited, and should attract a good amount of viewers and media attention. A flyweight (125 lbs.) bout between John Dodson and Darren Uyenoyama has also been signed.
This will mark the second time that UFC on Fox has gone head-to-head with -- some would say piggybacked -- a major boxing event. The first UFC on Fox show aired last November 12, up against the Manny Pacquiao vs Juan Manuel Marquez show. Both shows were successful, as UFC drew good numbers in their network debut, and the Pacquiao vs Marquez show did well according to, well, according to Top Rank, I guess, with estimates that it did around 1.4 million buys.
Last time, the question going in was whether or not UFC's free show would impact the boxing buyrate, and how much crossover between the audiences there really was.
Part of me believes that the first part is a more valid question this time, actually. That November show had one fight on Fox. This will be a three-fight bill. But UFC won't be going head-to-head with boxing once Mayweather is actually in the ring, and the truth is, the majority of buyers for this big boxing events don't give a damn about the undercard, which is why boxing pay-per-views don't often have memorable undercards.
What I've really been thinking about this time is something else, though: In the future, I don't see any reason whatsoever for HBO or Showtime to avoid running a Saturday night card against a UFC pay-per-view. That core audience is still going to be there. I'm not saying put up a bigger premium cable fight against the UFC PPV, but let's say, for example, something like Maidana vs Alexander (just a type of fight you could safely put on an open date against a UFC PPV). Why not? Was that show going to reel in a bunch of UFC fans?
UFC clearly doesn't believe they have anything to lose by going up against major boxing with a show on free TV. HBO and SHO aren't free, but they're the homes of boxing. UFC doesn't work around boxing's schedule; if anything, they try to take advantage of it. Boxing probably can't take advantage of anything with an HBO or SHO broadcast against a UFC PPV, but I don't think anything would really be different, and I doubt they'd take any hits with the right fight.
0 recs | 28 comments
Seems pretty clear UFC expects a lot folks to be at home/in bars in large groups when Pacquiao or Mayweather fight. By making sure their fights end before the boxers begin, they’re trying to maximize their audience. Pacquiao & Mayweather draw from a casual fan base far beyond the boxing faithful. It’s one the UFC believes they can get to eventually warm to their product as well.
Luke Thomas - January 25, 2012
It’s a good gamble.
Scott Christ - January 25, 2012
Didnt they already do this before the Mosley-Pac fight?
cyke - January 25, 2012
pac-marquez 3
TheDreadedMarco - January 25, 2012
That’s probably the one I was thinking about.
cyke - January 25, 2012
ufc is garbage.
PBF wins again.
BoxingOutlivesFads - January 25, 2012
Scott Christ - January 25, 2012
Looks at sig and name...
xFenixKnightx - January 25, 2012
...
Sugel Mendoza - January 25, 2012
for someone like me that enjoys both avidly it’s a total win/win situation. I can go into just about any bar on a sat night and catch a ufc event. I can’t do that with boxing. If I want to watch boxing I have to buy the ppv since I don’t have sho/hbo for smaller fights which I’m totally fine doing but the reason I personally love this so much is I don’t have to choose which one I have to watch and can one as a lead in to the other.
The UFC is doing a really good job of marketing themselves and usually giving you fights that you want to see often. I still enjoy boxing tremendously and can appreciate the two as seperate entities, I just feel boxing isn’t as easily accesible anymore.
TheDreadedMarco - January 25, 2012
I’m a boxing fan first but Diaz/Miller is just more exciting than any Mayweather fight could be.
UFC wins out on this one for me if theres any time clash.
Shitali Klitschko - January 25, 2012 via mobile
I’m not a Mayweather fan by any stretch so I’ll watch UFC that night as well unless he were to fight Pac but we all now how that’s going.
TheDreadedMarco - January 25, 2012
Velasquez vs Mir is the rumoured main event btw.
Shitali Klitschko - January 25, 2012 via mobile
nice! makes perfect sense to put a guy with Brown Pride tattoed across his chest on a Cinco De Mayo date. Cain takes it and sends Mir back to the end of top 10.
TheDreadedMarco - January 25, 2012
I don’t know about that. He didn’t look too good in the JDS fight. Mir may probably tear his rotator cuff again.
cyke - January 25, 2012
First off show me where it says Miller/Diaz is the MAIN EVENT?
It says its on the card, no article I have seen has it as teh main event.
Word is Mir/Cain in a HW contender fight could main event this card, Jones vs Rashad/Hendo could be on this card if they dont put it on the April Atlanta card,
This wont be the main event, I’ll bet on that, co main event, yes its good enough but not main event worthy.
Second the card will no doubt end by 10pm and we all know the main event for boxing PPV dont start at 10, they start well after that.
Second they did the same thing with Cain/JDS and had 9 mill people watching one fight.
Dont know why it has to turn into a boxing vs mma thing all the time, boxing fans get nervous seeing mma doing so well and mma fans diss boxing like its old not hip, its your grandfathers combat sport.
Neither are true, they are both great sports, different sports, both great, you dont like one dont watch it, neither are going anywhere.
CAC27 - January 25, 2012
Yeah, the Diaz fight being main event was my mistake.
Yeah I said that already.
Show me where it did. The headline, I guess? It’s just a headline to draw attention.
Please take this to some other site where people actually react that way to MMA. We have either hybrid fans or people who just don’t care about MMA at all but don’t go out of their way to crap on it.
And actually boxing isn’t hip. That’s, like, a demographic fact.
Scott Christ - January 25, 2012
Bloody Elbow has a few anti-boxer types, they can get annoying. But yeah here it’s mostly hybrid fans that I’d say were on either side of a 70% 30% liking of which ever sport. Minus the ones who don’t like mma at all.
I find I get in the mma/boxing style conversation with the Irish except it’s an American Football/Rugby/Gaelic Football argument.
I just prefer personally to start with me liking everything and see where I go from there.
Chris Sarda - January 26, 2012
"the truth is, the majority of buyers for this big boxing events don't give a damn about the undercard, which is why boxing pay-per-views don't often have memorable undercards."
Maybe if boxing put together BETTER undercards they wouldn’t have this problem. I for one watch the undercards on a PPV, trying to squeeze all the bang for the buck that I can, and I wish they would put together better ones.
I agree with dreadedmarco when he says he can enjoy both MMA and boxing as seperate entities, I feel the same way. UFC has the much better undercards in my opinion. Bad undercards are just one of boxing’s myriad of problems.
SmittytheCutman - January 25, 2012
The undercards usually are pretty doo-doo. Thats not usually the case in mma. Usually got at least 3-4 fights that I have a genuine interest in.
TheDreadedMarco - January 25, 2012 via mobile
Little late in the game for that, probably. “Boxing fans” — by which I mean people who don’t really follow boxing much but buy the big shows — are conditioned to not care about the undercard. For one thing none of the fighters on the undercards have been promoted as someone they think they need to see. Nobody knows who Tim Bradley is in a larger sense, they don’t care if he’s fighting on the undercard.
Take a look at the Cotto vs Margarito undercard, which was a phenomenal lineup on paper. MSG was d-e-a-d for those three fights. They didn’t give even the tiniest of shits about the Rios vs Murray bloodbath, or the Wolak vs Rodriguez fight, which was pretty good. This was a problem in 2008 on the first Cotto-Margarito show, too. Giovani Segura and Cesar Canchila had a terrific fight. Vegas crowd was a library.
Promoters know for a fact that the undercards on these shows don’t really matter. They sell the main event, and that’s it. UFC has made sure their audience cares about more than the main event by actually promoting undercard talent as worth watching. Boxing hasn’t done that in well over a decade at this point. The best you can hope for is they keep putting together the better undercards we’ve seen int he last two years or so, and maybe it’ll catch on, but until they actually start selling those guys, it’s probably an unwinnable war against a disinterested audience.
Scott Christ - January 25, 2012
Scott...I agree with everything you just said.
Why can’t that disinterest be changed to interest? It can IMO, but its going to take time, money, and effort from promoters. If the UFC can do it so can boxing and promoters should care that UFC fans care about the total card. It should be embarrassing to them that fans only care about boxings main event. Its embarrassing to me.
SmittytheCutman - January 25, 2012 via mobile
Problem is they have no reason to spend more money on an undercard when it won’t raise the bottom line at the end of the night. I know it’s a pay-per-view, but if the good fights added amount to no extra buys or anything (and they don’t), then it’s going to be hard to convince any promoter to basically give away good fights when they can instead sell those fights to HBO or Showtime, draw a gate (whatever it may be), and get the TV money from them instead of effectively showing them for nothing.
Scott Christ - January 25, 2012
Your going to hate it when I say this Scott, but undercards for individual promotions should be low level/prospect tournaments similar to what Bellator does, but then we’re going to fall into that tournament discussion again.
Chris Sarda - January 26, 2012
Boxing and MMA aren’t the same competition model, same as they aren’t the same business model. They’re different balls of wax. What works for Bellator will not work in boxing.
Scott Christ - January 26, 2012
I agree, I just think the lower level boxing prospect types and gatekeeper types are less likely to pull Andre Dirrell moves and tournament bouts are natural marketing plays for the bouts afterwards, that would in theory occur in subsequent ppvs.
With that said I still agree that the boxing world and the bellator/mma world are different balls of wax and business is done differently, but I think on that level (gatekeeper/prospect) for the idea of how to make undercards better overall without wasting an HBO card, it’s worth a try.
After all my parents deciding it was “worth a try” is why I’m here today.
Chris Sarda - January 26, 2012
one thing that sucked for me personally when ufc on fox debuted before pacquiao-marquez iii was that the sports bar that i went to to watch the fights played the audio of the ufc on fox instead of the audio of the boxing undercard fights.
as someone who has mild interest in mma, i didn’t mind having some of the many screens show the ufc event, but the $20 cover charge to get in was clearly for the boxing event and i would have preferred to have the house audio be of the undercard. granted, it’s likely that i was in the minority for caring about the undercard.
i actually wouldn’t have minded if they played the audio for the actual mma fight, all 64 seconds of it. but the other 59 minutes of analysis and especially commercials i could have done without…
jake_ash - January 25, 2012
I’d disagree with you but in that case yeah if there’s boxing going on why not put on that audio when the UFC was 99 percent talking, the juke box should have been on ahead of all that (empty) analysis.
Chris Sarda - January 26, 2012
You must Login with your SB Nation account and be a member of Bad Left Hook to post a comment.