UFC’s Lousy Build-up to July 19th
Published by on July 14th, 2008 in Current Events

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By Zach Arnold

It must be great to be the king of MMA, especially when your castle is in Las Vegas and nothing you seemingly touch or do these days will hurt you financially.

Like booking a throwaway MMA show in order to, pardon the pun, afflict some damage on someone you consider an enemy in your business.

Oh, sure, UFC and Dana White publicly claim that Affliction is not a rival. After all, to be a rival, you have to be somewhere in the same hemisphere as UFC in terms of size and credibility.

However, the reality is that Dana White has gone into Vince McMahon-mode and is pulling out one heck of a hard-sell to try to convince people to watching a free Spike TV event on July 19th.

We know Dana White publicly hates Affliction, but what we don’t know exactly is why. What is the rationale behind his hatred? Who knows. Reminds me a lot of when Vince McMahon gets angry at someone or something. The point is that when someone of this magnitude gets angry, it doesn’t matter what the reasoning is – you just know that someone is going to pay a heavy price.

What we know about UFC’s July 19th show:

Anderson Silva, Anderson Silva, and Anderson Silva.

Forget BJ Penn. Forget Urijah Faber. Forget Fedor. Silva, according to everyone in UFC, is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Naturally, UFC’s marketing machine has convinced many media types that this is a true statement.

Unfortunately, we don’t know much else about UFC’s ‘surprise’ event on the 19th, other than the fact that Spike TV is going to air the show live at 9 PM EST/6 PM PST and not use a delayed feed for the West Coast. That’s a first for UFC & Spike TV.

Wonder why they would want to air their show at 6 PM on the West Coast?

For such an aggressive attempt at putting on a show for July 19th, UFC has done a pretty lackluster job of actually promoting the event. The only thing the general public knows is that UFC has a cable show and it’s the equivalent of ‘free MMA.’ Right now, only UFC could get away with this kind of haphazard promoting due to the strong brand loyalty that they possess with many North American fans. If any other North American MMA organizer promoted a show as lousy as UFC has for the 19th, the keyboard warriors online would be hammering them for not knowing how to run a business. Heck, look at the lousy job K-1 is doing for their July 21st show in Osaka under the DREAM banner. They’re getting scoffed at on various parts of the Internet for it, too.

However, let’s face the facts staring us in the face right now. UFC can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and people for the most part will be satisfied with their product.

Quick – tell me any of the other fights on the July 19th card outside of Anderson Silva’s fight. By the way, do you even know who Anderson Silva is fighting in the main event?

Of all of the aggressive moves UFC has made in the past, the move to quickly rush to organize an event for July 19th (running against the Affliction event) is one of the strangest moves ever. Look at who UFC is running against. Affliction is making their MMA debut, meaning they have no promotional track record to speak off. Their debut show has a multi-million dollar budget and a lot of x-factors going against them. They might be lucky to draw 30,000 PPV buys.

So why is Dana White giving Affliction so much free publicity in media interviews when he rails against them? It sounds like something Vince McMahon would do.

Despite the rush-job for UFC’s July 19th show, I don’t believe for a second that your casual MMA fan looks at this upcoming event as a sign of ‘overexposure’ in UFC land of their product. Overexposure means that your audience has seen too much of your product and is sick of it. Right now, it’s obvious that no one is sick of UFC. Especially the casual MMA fan, who watches ESPN and follows sports on cable. Have they been exposed to Affliction advertising? Do they even know what Affliction is (other than some company that makes t-shirts)?

The gamble for UFC long-term is not that they risk overexposing themselves, but rather overestimating the value of being super-aggressive against promoters they deem to be ‘competition’. Remember, UFC ran a special presentation of Wanderlei Silva vs. Chuck Liddell on Spike TV to counter Elite XC’s debut on CBS (featuring Kimbo Slice vs. James Thompson). The result? Both shows did well in the ratings, meaning the audience watching MMA expanded as opposed to the two sides getting into a war of attrition and fighting over the same group of MMA fans.

Whether or not UFC’s July 19th event in Las Vegas is successful or not really doesn’t matter at this point. As far as Affliction is concerned, they will sink or swim on their own accord. Right now, the only thing that should matter to UFC is whether or not Anderson Silva a) wins his fight and b) remains healthy after fighting James Irvin. If Silva is to somehow get hurt, then this show will go down in the Dana White as one of his biggest blunders of all time. If everything goes according to plan, then it will just be a nice little side-chapter in MMA history that few people will ever remember about.