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By Patrick Wyman , MMA Senior Analyst Sep 9, 2015
Is the UFC putting on too many shows?
For many fans, particularly the promotion's core audience, the answer is yes. With more than 40 cards in a year, they say, it has grown impossible to follow favored fighters from event to event, and new potential stars have been buried on platforms with few viewers to watch them. UFC shows used to feel special, and with a card nearly every weekend, it's difficult to get fired up even for the biggest shows.
The debate around oversaturation reached a fever pitch in 2014, when the promotion ran 45 events and suffered its worst year on pay-per-view in a decade. Georges St-Pierre and Anderson Silva were gone. Jon Jones hadn't developed into a consistent draw. Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor had yet to fully emerge as draws in their own rights. With only 3.2 million pay-per-views sold all year, it looked like the promotion might be in financial trouble, and Standard and Poor's downgraded Zuffa's credit rating.
2015 has seen an enormous turnaround in the UFC's fortunes. Talk of oversaturation has largely quieted, though it still occasionally crops up. With three major shows left this year, the promotion has already sold nearly 5 million pay-per-views and is easily on track to have its best year since 2010.
How has the UFC turned it around? There are two clear answers and one that's less obvious. Fewer stars have suffered injuries this year, for one. Second, Rousey and McGregor have emerged as legitimate pay-per-view draws in the aftermath of enormous media pushes.
The third answer is the most intriguing, and it has completely flown under the radar. The UFC hasn't advertised it, but the promotion is on track to run fewer shows this year than in the exhausting 2014. "There's no such thing as diluting the product," said UFC President Dana White in an interview with Sportsnet’s “Tim and Sid” show in July (h/t Mike Bohn of MMAJunkie.com), but actions speak louder than words. With the recent announcement of another show for December's "Go Big" campaign that culminates in UFC 194, the UFC will run only 41 events this year.
That marks a substantial shift from the schedule the UFC announced last November. The plan was to run 45 shows—one fewer than had been planned for 2014—with 13 pay-per-views, four shows on Fox, 18 on Fox Sports 1 and 10 events on Fight Pass.
Instead, the UFC has only scheduled five shows for Fight Pass in 2015, with a possible sixth if the recently announced event on December 10 also ends up on the platform. The four cards that have been cut were all intended to be international events of the sort the UFC broadcast last year on Fight Pass. Plans to go to Russia and Holland for the first time and back to Abu Dhabi never came to fruition.
Essentially, the UFC has scaled back its international aspirations and the proprietary platform that was supposed to represent the wave of the future. The return has been drastically more attractive Fight Night and pay-per-view cards, with higher buyrates and better ratings on network television.
We can think about the impact of the canceled shows in concrete ways. The first event that the UFC cut this year was scheduled to take place on March 7. UFC 184 took place on February 28 and UFC 185 on March 14. How much less attractive would an already weak UFC 184 have looked without Jake Ellenberger vs. Josh Koscheck? Would UFC 185 have performed as relatively well (310,000 buys) without Alistair Overeem vs. Roy Nelson and former champion Johny Hendricks vs. Matt Brown? Absolutely not.
UFC 191 provides another excellent hypothetical example. Already a card thrown together at the last minute—two months out and not a single bout had been announced—the pressure of filling two more Fight Night events, scheduled for August 29 and September 19, would have gutted it entirely. Imagine the justifiable outcry at a co-main event of Jan Blachowicz vs. Corey Anderson or Paige VanZant vs. Alex Chambers on a card headlined by Demetrious Johnson.
As a counterpoint, consider UFC 177 last August, one of the worst pay-per-view events in the promotion's history even before Renan Barao hit his head while cutting weight and had to be removed from the card. A weak Fight Pass event in Macau the weekend before included Michael Bisping vs. Cung Le and Tyron Woodley vs. Dong Hyun Kim, the only two meaningful fights on a card packed with utterly unappealing matchups.
Continued at: How the UFC Has Done More with Less in 2015 | Bleacher Report
