It was a crazy month for MMA as EliteXC, UFC and Affliction all ran major shows within a one-week period.

According to most reports, Affliction and EliteXC ran the best live events.  I attended Affliction live and it's very clear from talking to people that the pay-per-view broadcast didn't come close to capturing the atmosphere.  The crowd was into the show from the beginning, but from the moment Josh Barnett knocked out Pedro Rizzo it really came off as a big-time major-league event.  EliteXC in Stockton was said to have had a similar vibe for the final two matches, featuring Stockton's own Nate Diaz and Scott Smith of Elk Grove, CA.  On TV, both UFC and EliteXC were slickly produced, professional events while Affliction suffered from issues with lighting and crowd mic'ing.  UFC in some ways came off a bit minor league if only because they ran in the smallest building.  But if you break the business down, the current number one MMA promotion in the world has little to worry about domestically.

As fun as Affliction was live, early indications are that the buyrate will be in the 60-80,000 range.  It may be lower or higher when the final numbers come in, but the bottom line is that they did not do the 300,000 buys needed to break even and lost millions and millions of dollars.  Promoter Tom Atencio is on the record stating that there is no way they can lose that kind of money on a second PPV, and has noted that they felt they had to run a major show right out of the gate to get people's attention.  It worked, but now they have to figure out how to continue operations with a much more limited budget. 

EliteXC has national broadcast television and the backing of CBS, but overnight numbers for Saturday night show a nearly 50% decrease from their first event, with just over 2 million viewers tuning in.  This shouldn't come as much of a surprise.  The group's two biggest draws, Gina Carano and Kimbo Slice, were both off this show, and the main event, Scott Smith vs. Robbie Lawler, featured nobody approaching what the casual fans would consider a star, and was merely a rematch of a decent first fight that ended after an inadvertent eye poke.  Not a recipe for ratings.

There is good and bad news for their third show in October.  Carano and Kimbo will return.  However, there has been an internal move away from the pro-wrestling-style promotion that helped make the first show such a big success.  Doug DeLuca, who has taken over promotion from former boxing figure Gary Shaw, wants to focus strictly on the fighting; he doesn't want fancy robes or goofy ring entrances or wild post-match brawls.  He wants to focus on the purity of the sport, two guys -- or girls -- getting into a cage and putting it all on the line.  The problem is that if this worked, the IFL wouldn't be dead.

UFC doesn't always promote like pro-wrestling, but Dana White largely knows what does and does not work.  They don't encourage fights at the Ultimate Fighter house, but if some form of insanity occurs than they'll run with it and try to make money off it.  Some of the biggest and most lucrative fights in MMA history, including Ken Shamrock vs. Tito Ortiz, had a pro-wrestling vibe to them.  An estimated 80,000 buys for Affliction doesn't sound good when you consider they needed 300,000 to break even, but the reality is that 80,000 buys for a show without national television is phenomenal.  The Affliction promoters were huge fans of the old PRIDE shows from Japan, shows which were considered in that culture another form of pro-wrestling.  Affliction, whether they knew it or not, in attempting to emulate PRIDE basically took tools out of the pro-wrestling playbook.

EliteXC needs to top 2 million viewers in October.  The bad news is that the biggest potential fight they had, Nick Diaz vs. KJ Noons, means nothing now.  Diaz and Noons had a huge pullapart after the last EliteXC event, with Diaz and his brother Nate starting a near-riot in the ring that eventually involved not only Noons, but also his father Karl, a former kickboxer.  It was tremendous television, and the footage airing on CBS would have helped boost ratings considerably for that fight.  But DeLuca found the scene appalling and refused to allow the footage to air.  That decision, while good to, I guess, "protect the purity of the sport", was essentially equivalent to filling a barrel with oil, lighting it on fire, and tossing fistfuls of cash in there. 

On the bright side, EliteXC stumbled onto one big money fight, Gina Carano vs. Cristiana Cyborg, a monstrous female from Brazil who destroyed Shayna Baszler Saturday night.  Carano cut a good live promo after the fight hyping it up, which thankfully could not be edited by DeLuca.  If promoted properly, that should help boost the October show closer to what the first show did.  There is no excuse, however, for that fight to be a bigger potential draw than Noons vs. Diaz.  Hopefully the EliteXC promoters will figure that out before they make further mistakes that they cannot afford.

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