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 By Lee Casebolt

Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, I presume you’ve heard about the deal between the CBS television network and MMA wannabe player ProElite, parent company of EliteXC.  The announcement has garnered a fair amount of response amongst the MMA congnoscenti, ranging from the moderately positive to the outraged.  On the one hand, you have those who see an enlarged market for the sport of mixed martial arts, with all of the opportunities that brings.  On the other, you have those who see Kimbo Slice, face of MMA, and are (justifiably) terrified.

Personally, I find the naysaying a little overblown.  Like the birth of MMA itself, like the debut of The Ultimate Fighter, like EliteXC’s initial deal with Showtime, the expansion of mixed martial arts onto US network television is at once a great opportunity and at the same time fraught with risk.  Success - how ever it’s measured - means the potential for incredible growth, not only for ProElite, but for all American MMA promoters.  Failure, detractors argue, could make MMA a public laughingstock, and damage the sport’s growing but fragile credibility.

Before we even address the chances of EliteXC becoming a success for CBS, we need to define what we mean by “success”.  It’d be nice to say that primetime MMA will be an instant hit, something CBS can put up against American Idol and be competitive with.  Nice, but dumb, or at least overly optimistic.  If those are the expectations, EliteXc is doomed to failure, and the executives at CBS are a bunch of morons.

Proceding from the idea that the good fellows at CBS are not, in fact, morons (a dangerous assumption with television executives, but one I’m willing to make for the people who bring me Criminal Minds), what are a reasonable set of standards for EliteXC?  Well, The Price is Right, occupying a very similar slot to the one which would house EliteXC, did a 6.2 rating last Friday.  While that’s only a third of mega-hits like Idol, it’s safe to say CBS is not shelling out big bucks to lose audience share.  So should that be the mark for “success”?

Maybe not.  A game show may not be the best comparison for a night of fights.  Let’s look at recent sports.  NBC’s broadcast of the US National Figure Skating Championships averaged a 3.2 over two nights, or a little over half what The Price is Right could muster.  Before you laugh at the comparison between two guys punching each other in the face and two people dancing on ice with sharp blades attached to their feet, I’ll note that figure skating outdrew pro wrestling (2.7), golf (2.7), the X Games (1.3), and both college (1.2) and professional (2.8) basketball for that week.  It was also the only one of those (other than pro wrestling - the WWE’s Friday Night Smackdown) to actually occupy a primetime slot.  6.2 looks awfully ambitious now, doesn’t it?

I’m hardly a television expert, so take this for what it is - the wildass guess of some guy who looked at the numbers for a couple of hours.  That said, I would expect EliteXC to have to pull in something in the high 3’s or low 4’s initially, and then show some growth, for CBS to consider it a success.  Less than that and the network could justifiably see it as a losing proposition and cut bait.

Can ProElite put together the kind of card that draws such a rating?  Smackdown’s 2.7 came from the same talent roster that earned 200,000 PPV (Survivor Series) buys.  The UFC’s closest competing PPV, UFC 80, drew 225,000 buys despite being on the same night as Jones/Trinidad, which attracted half a million PPV customers.  UFC 80 was one of the lower drawing UFC PPVs of recent months, so it would appear that the audience is there, provided the UFC audience is also an MMA audience.  There’s no guarantee of that, and Dana White has worked hard to make sure that’s not the case. 

For better or worse, the UFC is the face of US MMA.  Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell, tito Ortiz, and Quinton Jackson are the guys who carry the sport.  While Ortiz and Couture have had recent problems with Zuffa, they are nonetheless more heavily associated in the public consciousness with “UFC” than “MMA”.  While EliteXC has had some success with their Showtime broadcasts, they are starting out behind in the race for recognition.

To combat this, it is absolutely imperative that EliteXC’s first card be spectacular.  Gary Shaw seems married to the idea of Kimbo Slice - main eventer, about which I’ve already written.  That being the case, I fully expect Kevin Ferguson to be the featured performer on the first CBS broadcast.  I find myself in a quandry.  On the one hand, I think that Ferguson needs to be in the public eye if ProElite is going to recoup their investment on him.  On the other, he’s not very good yet, and there’s no guarantee he ever will be.  I have no idea who you put him in the cage with that’s both of a caliber to help draw audience and not likely to wreck him in short order.  My best short list is Kimo, Pat Smith, or the dessicated corpse of Don Frye, and bringing in Frye would worry me immensely.  Ferguson is, at this point, better suited to an “also featuring” than a “our main event of the evening” role.  Let him kill the Ruben Villareals of the world for a few more months before putting him in a pressure situation with an actual fighter. 

EliteXC would be better off having Robbie Lawler (if he’s healthy), KJ Noons, or Jake Shields in a title defense as a true main event.  Promote Ferguson all you want, but it’s going to be your champions - and Lawler and Shields, in particular, are world class fighters deserving of the biggest available forum - that keep people’s attention past the freakshow attraction stage.  These men are not only more talented, but also younger.  They’ll be with you longer if you watch out for them properly.  Lawler can fight another five years and still be younger than Ferguson is now, and can deliver all the highlight reel knockouts you could ask for.  Shields won’t give you as many KO’s, but he can likewise torment top welterweights for half a decade longer than Ferguson will be competing.  Both men are also fighters the commentary team can refer to as “elite” without causing laughter-induced injury to knowledgeable members of the audience. 

The reason I’m high on the CBS deal is not the chances of success.  Frankly, I expect to see one or two shows before CBS ditches them for another Survivor knockoff.  No, the reason this was a great deal for MMA (not necessarily ProElite or CBS, but I frankly don’t care about them) is that there’s no real downside for the sport.  Visibility increases, and there’s a chance that good things come of that.  If it fails… what?  No other network will try MMA?  No other network is trying MMA now, so what’s the difference?  The people who will point and laugh are the same people who are already pointing and laughing.  The people who will complain about violence on TV are already complaining about violence on TV.  Again, what’s the difference?  The difference is I will have a couple more hours of MMA recorded on DVD.  The difference is Robbie Lawler or Jake Shields or KJ Noons or some other deserving athlete will be seen by a few million people who might not have troubled to look for him otherwise.  The worst thing that happens is that ProElite overreaches somehow and finds themselves out of business.  In that extraordinarily unlikely case, I expect someone else will step up and fill their shoes.  The country is not short of smalltime promoters who want to be bigtime promoters, and every failure gives some astute mind one more step on the blueprint to success.  Those are consequences I can live with.

So good luck, Gary Shaw.  Good luck, CBS.  It isn’t weekly TV, at least not yet, but it’s a step towards better promotion of the greatest sport in the world.  I’ll be watching.