If you read my praise and our criticism of UFC events on my blog then you are probably aware of the fact that I have had considerably more negative things to say than positive ones as of late. It started to become what I considered a problem about 18 months ago when for reasons I couldn't yet put my finger on that the events just seemed to be losing a bunch of the edge that they had always had in the past.
I also constantly comment about how they have too many events. Years ago when I found UFC to be the most exciting, there was one UFC event a month and maybe a bit of some action on Fight Night events which were not Pay-per-view events that were broadcast on ESPN and normally these events would have one or two solid fights and the rest of the card would be a bunch of mostly nobodies.
These days, I feel as though the numbered events have about the same quality as the old Fight Night's had and the Fight Nights now are something that you probably don't even hear about.
Well it finally happened: A weekend with a UFC event went by and not a single person that I know locally or online so much as even mentioned the existence of this event. It took place in Sacramento, which if anything takes place there other than a Kings basketball game, it is probably rather irrelevant in the sporting world.
It was mentioned in passing the day after the fact and it was a more inquisitive statement than anything else when my friend said "There was (was there?) a UFC event on this weekend?" and around the table of our weekly kind of sporty meet-up of friends nobody was actually sure.
I pulled up the stats and saw that the main fight was a "war" as stated by the person doing the write-up and how the main fight had an upset that resulted in the winner calling out a champion that almost certainly doesn't think about them at all. I seriously struggled to match a face to a name in all of the readouts of the results and discovered something that is all too common with any UFC event, Sacramento or otherwise.
The undercards tend to get finished in glorious fashion and the main events, the ones that are on the advertisement, all ended in decisions.
There are two schools of though (probably more) about why this tends to be the case: The undercard men and women are proper unknowns or they are people who seriously need to turn things around or their career is going to stagnate or even disappear. Therefore, they put their all into it and swing for the fences and destroy or get destroyed. It's a risky game, but it is more entertaining for the audience and if you want to get noticed in UFC, that's kind of a big part of it. "Are you not entertained!?"
Well in this event that was precisely what happened. Nearly every single undercard fight was ended by KO, TKO, or submission but the last two fights, the co-main-evnts, went to the judges' scorecards.
I think this is because the top-billed people are fighting more conservatively because they don't want to end up on the wrong end of a highlight reel (understandable) but it also seems as though their strategy going into these things is to go the distance, to have enough gas in the tank to make it to the final bell. I guess it is an effective strategy but it doesn't make for very entertaining watching - which I am glad I didn't do.
Looking through the list of people on this Sacramento card I am not really all that surprised that I don't even know who more than half of the names even are. UFC has a lock on almost all the real MMA talent in the world and they have to use them and I guess this is where they do to.
Another thing that has been wrecking UFC for quite some time is the proliferation of commercials. There are a ton of planned commercial breaks but they go so far as to do those, also to have ads all over the ring and posts, on the equipment the players wear, what they hold during talks, and also the commentators will plug certain items or movies while the fight is going on. The fact that the announcer who intros the fighters pre-fight also has to plug some product and how the fight is "presented by Gillette!" or something like that. Urgh
This is too much but USA sports are really well-known and kind of loathed by the international audience because of this and it is also probably the reason why USA sports are some of the most profitable in the world, even the bad teams.
When UFC was Pay Per View, there was at least years ago, almost zero advertising during the events and that was when they were best. They needed to get us in, have the fights, then get us out. But gradually over time the events became a bunch of advertisements that just happen to have some fights going on at them.
One good thing came out of this though and that was that they didn't make the main event 5 rounds. In the past, and perhaps this rule has been adjusted, 5-rounds were reserved for title fights and all main events. I guess they put a stop to that and I'm not disappointed about that.
While UFC remains one of the most profitable sport franchises in the world, the quality of their product has gone down a great deal in the past 5 years. I have kind of lost my enthusiasm for them honestly, and this last weekend's fight is probably just one of many that I am going to end up not seeing.
