M
The whole thing is a joke. I am ALL for pushing big superstars but why the fuck did they not set up a rematch? I can see a delay with what happened re: the Nate Diaz fights but then they walk away from the trilogy just to give Conor a shot at a belt?!?!?!
Who cares? They would have made more money with a 3rd Diaz fight instead of the Eddie fight. Conor & the UFC have thrown two divisions into chaos with this shit when they could have been making boatloads more cash. PRIDE was actually REALLY hard on their stars and put them in some really bad fights just to make a buck (see Sakuraba and Wandy for a career of examples).
Thats hard to watch.
This sport is going to suffer when Big John leaves. He held Aldo in place without pushing him and was calm and collected throughout.
He also sons guys when they piss him off.
This sport is going to suffer when Big John leaves. He held Aldo in place without pushing him and was calm and collected throughout.
He also sons guys when they piss him off.
M
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For some, maybe.
The Aldo rematch didn't happen because the fight ended the way it did. Aldo was never a draw before that fight and there's no reason to believe that Aldo pt 2 would out-sell anything.
They didn't walk away from the trilogy. They did it correctly. Nate part 3 is a HUGE fight, no matter when you do it. You can either do it now and risk Conor losing, which takes away momentum (and potentially PPV buys) for a 155 title fight, or you do the title fight now when the iron is hot and you can justify it more, and the third Diaz fight is going to be there no matter what happens against Eddie. More guaranteed money the way they did it vs how you presented it.
Because of the above, I disagree with the "they could be making boatloads of more cash" statement. The prospect of fighting Mayweather got a lot more momentum with what he did to Eddie. The third Nate fight hasn't gone anywhere. The path they took, in my opinion, has maximized earning potential overall. You have to think down the road rather than what the biggest immediate nut could be.
Fucking Early Big John strikes again
M
member 3289
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Couldn't disagree more. You are assuming that they are going to have a 3rd Diaz fight. My assumption, looking at their history, is they will not. Conor lost. Then Conor pulled out a win and they will scuttle away with that and try and forget the first loss. By the time they get around to a 3rd Diaz fight (which probably won't happen) no one will care half as much as they do now. The Mayweather thing is a joke. It is just PR for both sides while Conor is resting with no fight booked. IT IS NOT GOING TO EVER HAPPEN. They keep repeating a cycle with Conor and that is he defeats a dangerous opponent and then never looks back. As far as Aldo, he was Conor's very first fight to break 1mm PPV buys. That is very meaningful and I think if they went with a 2nd fight it would have been very big. Luckily the Diaz thing happened a few months later so that worked out for them. The thing with having superstars fight and really maxing them out is you need VERY interesting storylines and/or opponents or you will just hit their base # and that base # will slowly decline (Tyson was a great example). You need ever escalating angles work to maximize dollars and prevent the inevitable decline in interest (endemic to all entertainment products).
Also, in regards to down the road: in the fight game down the road as an org is fine but not for fights/fighters. They have a super short shelf-life and ANYTHING can happen regarding injuries. Since fighting is an individual sport u don't have the luxury of long-term "team" road maps. You wait too long and a guy falls off, gets hurt, retires, etc. Nate Diaz could literally blow his knee out tomorrow and never fight again and all the long term planning goes out the window overnight.
Look at Ronda: One of the two big stars of the UFC that pulled them out of the 2014 disaster and she is done. Overnight, she get's her ass whooped, doesn't fight for a year and gets her ass whooped again (worse) and will probably retire and if not she is cooked anyway because her particular brand of hype (unbeatable / indestructible / can beat men) is completely blown and she has gone a bit mental.
Look at Jon Jones: Was a completely unbeatable champ and a few years later he is a total mess. They can't even schedule a rematch with Cormier because of all his troubles..
Look at Ronda: One of the two big stars of the UFC that pulled them out of the 2014 disaster and she is done. Overnight, she get's her ass whooped, doesn't fight for a year and gets her ass whooped again (worse) and will probably retire and if not she is cooked anyway because her particular brand of hype (unbeatable / indestructible / can beat men) is completely blown and she has gone a bit mental.
Look at Jon Jones: Was a completely unbeatable champ and a few years later he is a total mess. They can't even schedule a rematch with Cormier because of all his troubles..
Do you realize that these few sentences completely negate everything you said before about Diaz and Aldo? Diaz's storyline will always be interesting. Diaz got famous off of the Conor fight. He's famous enough to where if they fight again, it'll sell. I believe the first two fights are the top 2 PPVs of all time. With what they did, they put themselves in a situation where they can get the big payday off a Diaz fight down the road if they need it. It's in their pocket. It's one of the greatest rivalries this sport has seen, and that won't die.
Aldo's storyline was interesting until Conor floored him. To think that another Aldo fight immediately after the first one before Aldo could go get a couple of more wins would sell more than what they planned on doing (RDA for title) or what ended up happening (Nate part 1) is way off. Most people who bought that first card didn't know Aldo's history, and they're a lot less likely to buy it again if Conor is fighting the guy he murdered with one punch. We aren't talking about hardcores here, the goal is to sell to casuals, and they've only seen one 13 second Aldo fight.
So yes, I agree with you- you need great angles. I'm not sure how you can think that Aldo was that great angle.
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We are talking about a different animal. Conor and the UFC work in conjunction to maximize profits. A third Diaz fight in a row would 100% have sold, but (and this goes with your brilliant "new angles" assertion two posts ago) the Eddie fight was the fresh angle. They didn't want to stay stagnant, and it was a chance at history on the first MSG card. Now that it will have been a couple of fights since the Nate fight, it is going to feel more fresh if and when they schedule it again.
Ronda failed because of Ronda, not because of chance. Freak injuries happen, which has to do with chance, and people get caught and KO'd, which also has to do with chance, but Ronda handled her loss in a way that ensured that her momentum was gone. It was markedly different from how Conor dealt with his, and you're seeing the difference in the results. Conor knows how to spin things and deal with losses publicly, and he showed that he can survive failure. Ronda could not.
Jon's currently suspended but as soon as July he will schedule a main event against whoever wins between DC and Rumble and it will sell huge, provided he makes it to the cage. The OSP fight sold pretty well by anybody but Conor's standards, and Jones proved that his drawing power hasn't diminished through his inactivity. It may have actually gone up.
You're under the impression that a loss or an injury can derail consumer interest. That is the case for certain people like Ronda and Pettis, but Conor is a different animal. He can't be compared to most. The second Diaz fight out-sold the first, and the first went extremely terribly for Conor.
As an aside- you are currently criticizing the decisions made by the fighter who has earned more money in the UFC than anybody in history. He's obviously making some sound decisions here. The numbers disagree with you completely.
We'll have to agree to disagree because I don't really feel like writing a book about this. The numbers do not disagree with me at all and I would have to put a bunch of work in to explain how and I have zero desire to do so. Thinking that Ronda and Jones are falling off because of who they are and not the fact that anything can happen in sports, particularly high-impact 1-on-1 sports is really missing the mark. You are defending the tactics of a company who put Anderson Silva vs. Derek Brunson and now Gastelum wasting the last few fights of his career and who had the biggest year of their company in 2016 and yet still failed to beat the total number of PPVs sold in 2010.
Aldo vs. McGregor 1,025,000
McGregor vs. Diaz 1,317,000
McGregor vs. Diaz II 1,650,000
McGregor vs. Alvarez 1,300,000
You can see from those PPVs that Conor's base is probably around 1.3 mill at this point but with a potential for much more as we see with the Nate II fight. By not really pushing the envelope they are going to stay around his base until his star starts to fade. They are taking a very conservative route and writing it off since they are making plenty of money. the new owners dumped $4 bill into this company and will NEVER see it back unless they push the envelope. Cost cutting, watered down cards and Anderson Silva vs. Gastelum are not going to get them to $4 bill.
FYI: not gonna respond after this. Not being a dick but this just bores me now.
Ronda fell off because Ronda acted like a child. As I said before, it is evidenced by McGregor-Diaz II out-selling the first one. Yes, the numbers do agree with me. Jones hasn't fallen off. He hasn't fought. There's a difference there. We are talking about actual money making potential, and Jones sold well against OSP. There's evidence for you.
I also don't think you realize how much money is made from a 1.3 million PPV, and I am confused why you're bringing up "pushing the envelope for more buys" in a conversation that originated with you saying that they should have rematched Aldo immediately. Makes zero sense.
Fair enough that you're not going to respond, but I think you're severely misguided in this area. Honestly kinda seems like you're just anti-Conor and anti-UFC. I only say that because the only people who I have ever seen bring up arguments such as the ones that you're bringing up fall into that category as well. You just criticized the thought process behind four of the biggest PPVs in the history of MMA. If you think Aldo-Mac 2 sells more than Mac-Diaz 1, maybe you're right that there's no point in having this conversation.
Not sure about the whole "inevitable decline in interest" concept -- although it remains to be seen, I'd be willing to bet that after 3.5 years away from the sport, GSP is still a major draw. Also, the UFC will want to set up Conor-Nate 3 and anytime they do - whether it be in three months or 2 years -- it will sell huge. The history is there, they each have a win against each other, the two hype fights like no other, and the first two fights made big bucks. The new owners want to make their money back, so they're up for the biggest fights possible. And that includes McGreggor-Mayweather. Whereas the Fertittas might have said no, because of their unwillingness to co-promote, I bet you WME-IMG would be ok with it, as long as they make major bank. Plenty of people laugh at that fight, say that McGregor would get schooled, etc., but it would arguably be the biggest fight ever, with the right promotion and drawing from both MMA and boxing fans. Even of he loses, Conor can still continue on and draw big numbers in the UFC, so WME-IMG will be cool with it.
Just a clarification of the "inevitable decline in interest" concept. If you look at any entertainment property (movie, book, video game, fight, football game, etc.) there is a HUGE spike in interest at it's release (obviously with live sports) that VERY QUICKLY drops down to a long tail (if the property is good). All entertainment products to one degree or another suffer from this and it makes any entertainment industry EXTREMELY difficult to make money and string together an ongoing user base. It becomes a home run contest where each release is a new day where you start from scratch practically (except for movie sequels, and books series). This is why entertainment companies are in love with franchises. Food doesn't really have to worry about this. People buy chicken each week. "Entertainment" food, like candy, does suffer from this to a degree though.
So fights are the main, consumable product in MMA that follows this pattern, but fighters and trends within an org are also very susceptible to this.
This is what a single Entertainment product life-cycle looks like:
This is the pain that Entertainment companies must go through to stay in business. Constantly hitting home run after home run to keep their revenues stable. If you think of the series below as PPV/Big Fights, you can imagine how unstable and F'd it can be if one of them don't perform as well as the previous. Forget about what a mess revenues becomes if a few of them go wrong. And that's when your audience starts falling apart and it gets even harder to get back to the previous peaks because the outflow of users starts overtaking the inflow.
So fights are the main, consumable product in MMA that follows this pattern, but fighters and trends within an org are also very susceptible to this.
This is what a single Entertainment product life-cycle looks like:
This is the pain that Entertainment companies must go through to stay in business. Constantly hitting home run after home run to keep their revenues stable. If you think of the series below as PPV/Big Fights, you can imagine how unstable and F'd it can be if one of them don't perform as well as the previous. Forget about what a mess revenues becomes if a few of them go wrong. And that's when your audience starts falling apart and it gets even harder to get back to the previous peaks because the outflow of users starts overtaking the inflow.
Yeaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh.... I now regret even doing the last post cause I didn't see this one. Seems pretty clear what type of poster you are. Good luck dude. You know everything. Have fun.
Haha, alright. Takes two to tango, my man.