Saturday night UFC fight cards seeping into Sunday morning is nothing new – plenty of pay-per-view events that kick off at 10 p.m. EST bleed into the next day with few complaints.
But this weekend, it wasn’t a star-studded championship main event or high profile battle between contenders that remained when the main card of Saturday night’s Ultimate Fighter 18 Finale carried over into its third broadcast hour.
Instead, after a series of slow-paced contests, several video interludes and umpteen viewings of the hard-to-stomach UFC 168 commercial with the worst soundtrack ever, Sunday morning rolled around with a pair of fights still yet to arrive in the Octagon.
While Julianna Pena and Nate Diaz each turned in impressive performances in the their respective first-round stoppage wins, it was too little and far too late.
From the outset this event was unable to build any momentum. After an exciting opening fight between Josh Sampo and Ryan Benoit ended in a second-round submission win for Sampo, the next three contests went the distance. Though they each had their high spots, all three got progressively less exciting as the rounds piled up, leaving viewers hopeful that the next fight would inject some energy into the proceedings.
It never did.
A potential firecracker of a featherweight bout between Maximo Blanco and Akira Corassani ended just 25 seconds in when Blanco crushed Corassani with an illegal knee, prompting the fight to be stopped and the Venezuelan competitor to be disqualified. From there on out it felt like the event was stuck in quicksand.
The studio segments were stunted – Jay Glazer continuing to struggle as the host as Chael Sonnen and Michael Bisping went on tangents as everyone talked over each other incessantly. And the video packages weren’t better. I don’t even want to get into the train wreck of an interview that featured Ronda Rousey, Miesha Tate and an overmatched Jon Anik.
If the fights on the main card were barnburners, we wouldn’t be having this conversation – entertaining fights nullify any and all production issues – but they weren’t and that made all the other negatives from the night stand out even more.
Here’s the thing: there’s nothing wrong with vignettes explaining the significance of an upcoming contest or “sell your upcoming fight” interviews between upcoming opponents but you have to pick your spots.
Saturday night the UFC picked too many spots and the broadcast suffered mightily because of it.
While I understand wanting to familiarize viewers that didn’t watch Season 18 of The Ultimate Fighter with each of the finalists, sandwiching a five-minute “Meet the Competitors” video between two sets of commercials for both the men’s and women’s finale meant that two bouts that didn’t last a combined three rounds ate up nearly an hour as a new month started on the East Coast.
Fans aren’t going to pull away from pay-per-view broadcasts that drag on because they’ve opened their wallets or ventured out to their local bar to catch high profile pairings that close out the show, but these televised events built around newcomers, emerging prospects and a couple ranked competitors don’t necessarily have the power to keep the audience captivated.
With more cards like Saturday’s TUF 18 Finale on deck for 2014, the UFC needs to address the issues that plagued this show in order to make sure that similar events in the future don’t turn into laboured efforts like this one.
Honestly, the issues are pretty easy to fix.
For starters, the studio show has to become more effective and efficient. Instead of having Glazer awkwardly set up prediction segments where Bisping and Sonnen take too long to say too little, find a host that can keep the segment on track and prevent the analysts from going off on tangents.
Secondly, use the opportunity to talk about the fights people might have missed and give the fighters that won earlier in the night a little time to shine. While the first three televised prelims might not have been epic battles, cutting a quick highlight package together and mentioning that Sean Spencer, Jared Rosholt and Tom Niinimaki earned victories is far more useful than Glazer, Sonnen and Bisping talking over each other.
And there is absolutely no excuse for not replaying Sampo’s win over Benoit, which ended up being the Fight of the Night.
The first round was a fun back-and-forth and it ended in the second with Sampo catching a rear naked choke out of a scramble on the mat. Even if you just show snippets of the bout and the eventual finish, getting what was the only finish in the first seven contests (and the eventual Fight of the Night) out to the masses that most likely skipped the lone Internet prelim between two newcomers would have been a good decision.
A big part of the problem, admittedly, was that the first bout of the evening only hit the cage at 7:30 p.m. EST. That one couldn’t really be helped, since a steady dose of big-time college football games preceded the event on its originating network, Fox Sports 1, but in the future the UFC needs to do everything they can to avoid these situations.
Part of what makes the quarterly UFC on FOX broadcasts great from a viewer standpoint (and that of a journalist covering the shows too) is that they get under way early in the afternoon, with the two-hour main card hitting the air at 8 p.m. EST. They run the fights into the cage one after another, keep things compact and on schedule, and the show is wrapped before the puck drops on the West Coast NHL action or shortly thereafter.
It’s glorious and everyone goes home happy. Even if the bouts lack excitement, the quick pace and early end time make it hard to be too upset.
Unfortunately for Saturday night’s TUF 18 Finale, it started too late, struggled to find a rhythm and became more of a “When is this going to end?” affair as opposed to an “I can’t wait to see the next fight!” evening.
These nights are few and far between, but when they come it’s hard to overlook their struggles. Thankfully, we have another event on Friday night to roust us from the malaise of Saturday’s clunker.