How the Mainstream Views UFC 97 and Anderson Silva

good point..this is what i was afraid of also. UFC 97 was bad in so many ways for the sports increased viewership. the most well known name in MMA to the casual fan (iceman)..done..in ugly fashion. the sports “p4p best” …yawner of a performance. bad bad bad. i feel it was bad enough..that i wouldn’t be surprised if dana didn’t offer up a free blockbuster card on spike asap just to make it up to fans and potential lost casual fans.

I simply disagree that Silva’s performance was ‘apathetic’.

I wonder how much damage was done to the fledgling Canadian market. For the UFC to beat the attendance record at 83 this time out was surprising to me. I have a feeling that a lot of people who went on a whim will not be going again after such a terrible showing.
I haven’t a clue how they’re going to address Silva’s issues, I sure would like to be part of any conference calls the Zuffa brass has with Silva’s management.

They have a tendency in that market to abandon ideas quickly. They are also a market that experiments with new ideas, often times dropping them and restarting them over and over again.

But so can Dana White and Zuffa. Was I personally entertained/intrigued/amused by Anderson’s behavior? Yes, I was. Were the majority of the viewing audience similarly satiated by this somewhat bizarre display? Absolutely not. For me, the only reasonable course of action from a marketing perspective, which says nothing of Anderson’s freedom to fight how he did against Leites, is to slot Anderson Silva’s next title fight in a semi-main just below a marquee non-title fight. We see what are widely considered boring fights regularly, but I think most of the frustration is a result of the top billing of Silva/Leites. I emphatically disagree with anyone that says Anderson Silva owed us something (he won), and I particularly disassociate myself with those of you that attempt to say so objectively. It’s clear that Dana was underwhelmed by the pace of the fight. That’s the only reasonable recourse in my mind. Let him know he’s not exciting enough for top billing and that he’ll be back there once he is. As for me, I don’t have a problem with what happened in the fight, because I was more in awe of how he emasculated Leites and, to be honest, destroyed Leites’ value forever in out-classing and humiliating him for 25 minutes, and not being any worse for wear than he was when he stepped into the octagon. I think one person has a right to be mad about what happened and that’s Leites— at himself for his inability to pose any sort of a significant threat or to attempt to do so, at Joe Silva for putting him in a fight he couldn’t win and at Anderson for being content to technically embarrass him instead of taking risks to finish the fight (that I’m confident he could have). But it was Anderson’s distinct prerogative to approach the fight in the manner that he did and the assertion that he has to finish to win is objectively incorrect.

I talked to a few fringe MMA fans that watched UFC 97. They all feel like MMA has hit its peak and isn’t worth paying the money to watch anymore. They believe that because of the way the UFC fighting system operates, events will continue to disappoint and exciting matchups are dwindling.

I disagree, but I can see where they are coming from. Hopefully, the coming events will dissuade them.

Not every fight is going to be awesome and not every fighter is going to dazzle us with their amazing skill set. I was just as disappointed as anyone with the fight but let’s take a step back and see the big picture. It was a bad match up and Anderson Silva didn’t perform the way we wanted him too. This one fight isn’t going to destroy the sport. Boring main event fights are going to happen. I am really surprised at the way previously cool headed objective fans are freaking out about this one fight.

“Again, I will make this as clear as humanly possible, so if you cannot grasp this idea when it’s stated this plainly there’s little I or anyone else can do for you”

Save it for the radio, champ.

everyone here that is defending it is ignoring the point. You’re all on Luke for saying it…but what he is saying is that the fight turned off people in the media. For a sport that has a LOT of growth to do there are people who are done promoting it because they feel the product sucks. That’s the issue. Luke or my or anyone else in the hardcore base’s opinion does not matter in this discussion.

The way I see the Silva fight is the same way I look at performance in the workplace. When you work for someone, they are paying you under the belief that you will do your best. A reasonable boss would not expect you to make the big sales all the time, but they will expect you to try your best, because they are paying you. They don’t pay you to slack off or “do what ever you want” or goof off. You do your best, because the expectation is that you are required to. Get what I mean? Silva may not owe the fans anything, despite them paying for tickets and PPV, but he owes Zuffa a good fight, to try his best. That’s where I think it was lacking. For some strange reason or another, he wasn’t giving it his all, according to Dana, who was plenty disappointed by the performance.

Now tie in the fact that he’s the P4P king, and the fact that the casual fan doesn’t have the loyalty to stick it through thick and thin, you have a problem when trying to grow MMA into the mainstream when a performance like that is put in. I don’t know about anyone else, but I am not content to have MMA a fringe sport.

I’m actually a little worried about this fiasco. If this is at all representative of some people’s opinions, this could signal a disappointing year for the UFC.

Everything falls into either “greatest thing since sex and if you don’t agree you’re an idiot” and “so stupid and worthless that if you don’t agree you’re an idiot”.

I’m sort of surprised that “O and Dukes show” suggest that the last 3 events sucked.
Unless they were suggesting that the main events in the 3 of them sucked, the 3 previous events had good fights just the main events were lopsided or dull.

Is this article really suggesting anything other than “be mad at Anderson Silva?”

I’d love it if he would just start finishing fights.
 
But unless you’re talking about some kind of a locker-room agreement or an amendment to scoring standards, it’s only people other than Anderson who can really be counted on to take action.

Maybe Dana stops calling him the gold standard of what people should be watching, and starts verbally promoting the more cooperative GSP as the sport’s P4P king.

Maybe the UFC starts offering Anderson nothing but 205 lb fights and puts 185 on ice for as long as it can.

I read this, and it’s like: YES, I do think it’s possible AND commendable to push to finish at all times without it being a human demolition derby. There’s a lot of guys that fight like this— (pre-GSP) BJ Penn, Kenny Florian, Demian Maia, etc who are brilliant, technical and artistic specimens of the sport. YES, also clearly we can’t underestimate the effects of this on your livelihood specifically or that of MMA’s staying power as a sport at large. It sucks. It really does. Anderson messed with a lot of stuff by turning in this performance.

But it still blurs the lines in any way to say that marketing and entertainment spectacle alone should play into how someone solves for the rules of a sport. I get that from a purely realist perspective it will seem like apologist rhetoric to defend Anderson, but with any sport you either make concrete changes to the model or live with peoples’ will to abuse less-than-exciting interpretations of the spirit of the game. This is endemic to real sports everywhere.

Getting mad at Anderson, satisfying and justified as it may be, simply isn’t enough. A game is defined by its rules, and the “Anderson problem” as it’s emerged either has to be managed around with matchmaking, stapled shut with wads of money, or addressed head-on through the rules themselves.

Anderson SHOULD feel a stake of responsibility for the well-being of the sport at large, and a responsibility as a champ to show people something in the octagon. But that aside, how to fix this should be the question, not how bad should Anderson personally feel for essentially pointing out a weak spot in the entire arrangement that is the UFC, even if it makes him some kind of total jackass (which it does, I suppose, when you put it like this).

Although the Spider is one of the top two or three (or one if you work for Zuffa) fighters in the world, he is not one of their 5 biggest draws/moneymakers. I would assume Chuck, Brock, GSP, Randy, maybe Quinton and even Tito if he came back would all be considered bigger “draws.” So im not sure how much this wil affect the UFC and its image. Hell, they’ll prolly lose more casual fans and appeal from Chuck losing again in TKO fashion even though he wasnt even top 5 in his division. The casual fan like many of my friends wont be heard dropping “OMG did you hear that p4p top 3 fighter Anderson Silva won, but it was boring as shit… he should step it up!” They may have watched the fight and may have been bored to tears (expecting a ballet of violence that i had promised them) but they wont back away from the sport completely.

His performance didnt impress most of us… so we (MMA diehards) are the ones to suffer, but there is a silver lining. Dana wont let it happen again. Wandy, Cane, GSP, or some of the big boys at LHW wont let the Spider fight a point TKD fight. They may wake up with smelling salts in their face, but they wont subject us to a mess like we just saw saturday.

The future is bright for the Spider. With only a handfull of fights left for Zuffa, i dont expect Dana and Joe Silva to waste one of these on an Okami snoozefest and Maia may have just lost his (well deserved) title shot. They’ll put someone in there to get in his face or who’ll put him on his back… will he still win? I would assume so, but it will be a helluva lot more pleasing to watch than Leites. This fight wont hurt the sport or Zuffa/UFC in the longterm, it will just provide some internet backlash. It may actually help in the big scheme of things.

Good article Luke. On a tangent, when is the next podcast?