MMA Not That Big Time Yet

The injury was first reported Monday night by MMARated.com, and was confirmed on UFC's official web site shortly thereafter. Today Liddell's injury has received a fair amount of coverage in the mainstream sports media, and it was mentioned on ESPNews, which is something of a watershed.

On the web, you can find the news (although not very prominently featured) on ESPN.com and FoxSports.com, and Yahoo, of course, is all over it. But it's nowhere to be found on the web sites of CBS Sports or Sports Illustrated. And most newspapers continue to pretend MMA doesn't exist. A Google News search reveals only one newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, that covered Liddell's injury.

So have UFC and its biggest star entered the mainstream? I submit that they have on the web, where news outlets carefully track traffic stats and know that MMA coverage brings in eyeballs and can help sites become, say, the No. 6 blog on the net. But newspapers, which are less attuned to the interests of their readers, still leave MMA behind.

Standard & Poor's in November downgraded Zuffa's $350 million of debt, citing weak pay-per-view buys and poor results in England.

IFL, which has lost $31 million since its inception in 2005, said in its annual 10-K filing last week that it "will likely have a cash shortage which would disrupt our operations, have a material adverse effect on our financial condition or business prospects and could result in us being unable to continue our operations."

ProElite, which lost $27 million in 2007 on $5.3 million in revenue, similarly disclosed in its 10-K filing that "our auditors have expressed substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern."