What a world Dana White is looking at when it comes to pay per view in 2014. Much different than the one he started with at this time a year ago.
Georges St. Pierre is gone from MMA, probably unlikely to return. Brock Lesnar’s continuing flirtation with coming back to the UFC is just that: continued flirtation. Jon Jones hasn’t quite lit a fire under PPV buyers the way many thought he would. We don’t know if Chris Weidman will retain any of the audience that saw him stop Anderson Silva twice, the last time on the biggest fight card of 2013. Even the “baddest man on the planet,” heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, has had trouble drawing in regular crowds willing to pay to see him fight.
The new generation on top may be better skilled than their predecessors but unfortunately haven’t been able to capture the PPV audience. Thus it’s an interesting anomaly that the UFC’s biggest draw of a fighter is Ronda Rousey, potentially, as the women’s star has gone from unknown commodity to being billed as the UFC’s biggest superstar in a couple years. After headlining the biggest fight in women’s combat sports history against Liz Carmouche, and then co-headlining the biggest PPV of 2013, Rousey gets the chance to dispel what many hardcore MMA fans are thinking right now.
Ronda Rousey’s drawing power will truly be defined Saturday night.
UFC 170 is her chance to prove she is a genuine PPV draw. If not Rousey has the potentially for having a significant historical revision in the perception of women’s combat sports. UFC 157 will most likely be viewed as a one time, fluke coincidence turned perfect storm that crossed an unheard of (for a woman’s fight) 450,000 plus buys if UFC 170 draws as poorly as some are predicting.
That’s the biggest story that no one is talking about when it comes to this weekend’s card. Having once been bolstered by Rashad Evans vs. Daniel Cormier, a perfectly acceptable main event fight that could draw on its own, this pay per view has now become a referendum on the power of Ronda Rousey’s drawing power on her own. Her first headliner she had a ton of help on a fairly stacked card, with local favorite Urijah Faber in the featured fight and traditional draws Dan Henderson and Lyoto Machida in the co-main.
Rousey was also given the best possible conditions to pop a buyrate, including more media coverage than any fighter in the UFC ever had for what was a historic main event. No one had received the sort of coverage she did for breaking the gender barrier in the UFC and she isn’t receiving that kind of coverage for her third fight in the UFC either. The “women fighting in the UFC” story is over for large news outlets, as female fights have been mainstreamed into the UFC now. The newness factor of Rousey in the UFC is over.
Women’s strawweights entering the UFC via a season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” and women’s fights outperforming the men in the Rousey headlined season of the show, are no longer as profoundly controversial as they would’ve been when the only significant female fighter of note (Gina Carano) dropped MMA to begin a career as a mediocre at best actress appearing in (mostly) bad movies. Women’s fighters have improved significantly and the UFC has figured out how to make money promoting them without embarrassing the brand in both fight quality and fighter quality.
Saturday night gives us the best possible chance to see if Dana White’s biggest gamble, of giving Ronda Rousey the sort of star power treatment that no fighter has gotten in some time, will pay off. Rousey was able to add onto one of the biggest rematches of 2013 with her fight against Tate after a mostly successful season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” a fight that got plenty of interest because of the interpersonal rivalry. UFC 157 was viewed by many in the sports world as a novelty, the first women’s fight in the UFC with perhaps the next big star.
Both of those fights weren’t counted to do big business on their own and performed above & beyond what Zuffa expected them to do. UFC 157 doubling up what many predicted the fight would do was pointed to by a lot of people as definitive proof that Ronda Rousey was a star for any number of reasons. But it wasn’t. It was a perfect storm of everything syncing together to make what was a historical event into something bigger than what many thought it was.
UFC 170 will be the measuring standard for Ronda Rousey’s drawing power. She’s no longer the novelty and her drawing power, and her drawing power alone, will be counted to get people to pay for the privilege of seeing her fight. Her ability to be a star in the best, most measurable way possible (and not just because Dana White says so) will be proven. It’s one thing to move the dial on the web and on television; her ability to draw on PPV can be proven Saturday night.
