Dana White Sics UFC Fans on ESPN

I wouldn’t call that flying off the handle.

ESPN does this all the time. During the 08 Olympics they published the results of the events 8 hours before we could watch.

I get his frustration because spoilers can cause people to not tune in to a card. Even though this isn’t a PPV, the ratings/eyeballs when it airs live in the US matter to the UFC’s moneyline. A primetime airing of the event will obviously cause a greater chance of catching said eyeballs, especially when competing with college football.

On the other hand, this is entirely a UFC/Spike tv issue and not an ESPN fuck up. They could air it twice as they have done in the past (both on SPIKE and PPV) so that fans who want to watch it live can, and people who want to have a “UFC Party” can watch it at night.

Similar problems happened yesterday with the sidebar on this same site during the delayed broadcast. The fanhouse portion spoiled the main event and readers who showed up for the SPIKE discussion were upset about it.

I don’t think he was bashing the media or ESPN as much as he was just trying to re-direct BS complaints from fans. Kind of like, I didn’t publish anything Sportscenter did. And not complaining that they did as much as just saying, don’t bother me dumbasses, go bother ESPN.

Did it come off correct? No, especially to those in the media who have had to knuckle under to King Dana, but in this instance, I think White is getting a bum rap.

I don’t find what he said to be that big of a deal, but it also wasn’t very professional. Then again, that’s not what i expect from Dana White.

We elected to go with live coverage but with the results hidden after the jump and then did a second discussion thread for the Spike TV broadcast.

This is how it should always be. I know you want traffic, but there is no need to publish the result in plain sight. just have a headline that says Bisping vs Akiyama play by play and result, then have it after the jump.

I know I bitch about this a lot, but it is the world we live in, where people often DVR and so on.

That plagues every single Spike show for at least some part of the country. If you can do it for the prelims why not your other shows? Oh that’s right, Spike’s gotta plug Blue Mountain State and TUF, do they not?

But yes I’m so pissed at ESPN for showing the results.

Is they dont show the results of EVERY UFC fight card… They only show results to major PPVs and when Spike tape delays shows… They NEVER EVER show results of UFN or VERSUS fights on their main page or bottom line… I have been screwed by ESPN showing the results in the past so i made sure I avoided the site yesterday… As i was watching the game on ESPN last night I saw they had MMA listed on the bottom line, so i changed the channel knowing they were going to show the results. I do feel that ESPN does kinda go out of their way to screw us with the results being posted plain as day on their site…
As far as Dana asking ppl to bitch to ESPN I agree bc he was likely hearing it from the Fans but he can do nothing about it EXCEPT tell them to bitch to ESPN…

But its just twitter. The intern Dana has tweet for him momentarily annoyed the official at ESPN that runs twitter. Lame but its not a big deal.

They and other media outlets are going to report on events as soon as they’re completed. That’s just something people are going to have to deal with.

And I highly doubt Dana would be upset with ESPN coverage of anything Zuffa does, even if upsets people for getting “spoiled.”

ESPN is now showing results for UFC over boxing (or at least before boxing), which is very telling.

I’ve got no problem with this, heck I don’t understand why anyone does? Dana passed the buck for spoiling the show to the people who spoiled the show. ESPN only cares about ratings and if enough people message them saying they were unhappy with this then it will show ESPN that there are plenty of UFC fans watching their broadcast for them to market to. They aren’t going to get pissy and childish and pull UFC coverage from their sports ticker unless only a handful of people actually complain and they assume no one watching cares about the UFC. Numbers of people contacting them about MMA just shows them there is a market, the rest of this is meaningless.

Here’s my take on things at Cageside Seats :)

And I made sure to avoid going to BE yesterday for this very reason so if a similar method was employed, forgive me if it sounds redundant. Have the live play-by-play results up but hide the write-up on the main page. Also, don’t post individual fight result articles until after it’s been shown on spike. Bing, bang, boom, you have readers that can read the play-by-play if they want to and those that haven’t seen it yet or don’t want to see it yet can wait till after the show to go to the site and immediately see something like “CARLOS CONDIT KTFO DAN HARDY!!!”

Waiting around 3 hours in todays media world is nuts.

Just watch it when its live and be done with it.

fuck dana. if you air it live, it can’t be spoiled. shut it, Dana. money-grabbin POS. just air it live

Voices the concerns of many of its fans… and of course gets condemned for it.

Baseless anti-Dana whine article.

If all those people really didn’t care if the results were live…they wouldn’t complain. The fact that they did shows that ESPN ticked off a lot of people, and they had every reason to complain.

but of course that would mean looking into WHY those people were angry. That’s too much work when we can BLAME DANA!!!

Seriously…can Dana White do a single thing that SOME writer here wouldn’t bitch about. I sincerely doubt it. White could open up MMA in a whole fresh market and get a paragraph..but if he gave $5 to a homeless guy there’d be 3 front page stories about it.

Dana blasts media, Media blasts dana. All seems normal.
Fortunately I was busy yesterday and didn’t sit down in front of the tv or comp until after 7. Personally I would have been pissed if it ticked across the screen while I was watching football or something. It’s one thing if you tune into a sports news show and get recaps of everything, but hard to avoid those tickers everywhere sometimes. They should really give us the option to view it live though.

for airing EA MMA? I thought he might have a shit fit over that one.