A Brief Word about “Trilogy” Aftermath
Posted by Alan Conceicao on July 28th, 2009
There’s been a lot of nonsense out there on the internet about this in the last few days coming from all angles, and I think it should probably be addressed in a fashion becoming of adults rather than petulant man-children:
-Affliction’s death by no means guarantees the end of competition to the UFC just as DREAM’s potential any-day-its-gonna-happen demise would prove the end of Japanese MMA. Last I checked, Sengoku and Strikeforce are still around, and there’s always talk of new money entering the sport.
-The sudden death of Affliction and cancellation is good for the sport only if the talent migrates to the UFC, where it would obviously be best used and tested. Since that likely isn’t going to happen given the nonexclusive nature of the contracts (as I said last week and Meltzer reviewed again yesterday), we’re no better off as fans. Long term, Affliction was going anyways. We just didn’t get to see the fights.
-I keep hearing that one of Affliction’s problems was “booking for the internet fans.” Its an interesting argument, I suppose until you realize no one can define what that means. Would Affliction have been better off taking the cancelled Vernon White/Babalu fight and using it for themselves? I suppose its possible. Would have been cheaper than Whitehead or Sokoudjou. Then again, what do I care? I’d prefer to see good fights. Those were good fights on paper. Tiger White/Babalu isn’t. If Affliction decided to spend money on a bunch of lousy squashes, they’d have been panned even harder than they were for running what they did, and I see no reason they would have necessarily been successful doing it, or why I should cheer for more economical but crappy fights. If that’s a side effect of being into the “biz” first, I’d argue you don’t actually care about the sport of MMA.
-There’s an interesting line coming out, oddly generated mostly from guys with pro wrestling backgrounds, that there is an anger about its demise based on the emotional attachment of fans to Affliction as chief competition to the UFC. I think I even got named, which is pretty funny, given that I’m the guy who tells people not to have emotional attachments to promotional bodies unless they have money invested. Tom Atencio is gone and with him go a bunch of fights most of us were going to watch online. The loss is minimal to most. The sun has, in fact, risen, and we even have Mousasi/Babalu on Strikeforce’s card.
However, the gain for people who constantly attempt to remind the world that the UFC is on its way to unabashed success and total domination of the marketplace has been a bizarre one: Lots of gloating. Lots of talk about how great it is that this happened. Lots of e-chest bumping. These are generally the same people that will post any interview with Dana White, regardless of the content, and freak out over any possibility of a “HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT”. I don’t need to name names. Everyone on the internet knows who they are. Its pretty transparent that for them, there is a huge emotional attachment; a fufilled need for validation somehow connected to the success of some other guy in promoting his fights. Why the need to attempt to justify it by pushing off that to other people as an Us vs. Them battle of the smart, objective, but also fantatical one-promotion needy vs. Guys Who Don’t Care Who’s Footing The Bill So They Must Miss PRIDE, I’m not sure.
-As far as the UFC is concerned, since they’re unlikely to take guys on en masse, I don’t see any quantifiable change in their methods or actions. Which is fine, mind you. They have a pair of great main event fights on a single card coming in 3 weeks or so - nothing to fix there. Sure, it could have been bolstered up to the point where I might have actually bought it with a stronger undercard than Josh Neer: PPV Fighting Icon, but I’ll still watch it in some way and enjoy the show whenever it is that I get around to seeing it.
Now, would it be nice if they took my suggestion from years back and offered a licensing deal to make the M-1 Challenge a sort of Single-A Ball for the UFC by demanding a cage/unified rules along with picking up Fedor? Oh, it would be great. Who would complain? Win win everywhere there, far as I’m concerned. It gets us closer to a single rule set, a single construction for rings, and all the other things that will ultimately be necessary for the sport to really begin to take the shape of an actual, major league sport while promoting the UFC across the world on someone else’s dime. But it won’t happen. And so the door remains open for the next guy with money to plot how he wants to enter the field.
July 28th, 2009 at 9:24 am
I generally don’t bother to comment back as most of the articles I read (especially regarding this topic) are one-sided, sheepish, dismissive, or uninformed. However this was probably the best thing I’ve read about the subject and really puts some important things into perspective.
Are we fight fans or are we business analysts? It seems to be so muddied these days with competing promotions that more and more I see people leaning toward the latter. The fact of the matter is, ultimately, whether or not Affliction had a “good business model” or spent too much money is irrelevant when put up against the fact that as a fight fan I was able to see two of the best cards with some of the best fighters ever put together. Why does it matter to fans of the sport how much money said cards made or what brand they are promoted by? Isn’t what’s important is seeing the best fights possible?
But it seems like a lot of people are so caught up in trying to present MMA as a legitimate sport that they lose sight of what’s important; the fights.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
For a particularly egregious example of this kind of business-first thinking, see Tomas Rios’s recent article on Sherdog about how fans should refuse to pay for fights put on my promotions that are “doomed to failure.” Or you could, y’know, pay for the fights you deem worth paying for. But I guess that would stand in the way of the inevitable UFC utopia.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
That article was part of the inspiration for my message board post-cum-blogger analysis. Honestly, I’m fine with the UFC utopia if it was to ever come to fruition, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon, if ever. The attitude that nothing can happen except UFC domination is outrageous: Boxing promoters are about to pour money into trying to push for the Ali Act to pertain to MMA. If they succeed, even if it takes 3-4 years to do so, guess what happens? We’re 15 years into this sport’s existence and only now have broken into a long enough run of Dana White being a promotional genius for as long as he was an abject failure.
July 28th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I’m not too familiar with the Ali Act, aside from its basic contents. What do you think would happen if it were to be applied to MMA?