UFC Sacramento: Wrong Main Event?

UFC Sacramento: Wrong Main Event?

By Alex Conway

The UFC’s bantamweight division will be featured in the main event of Saturday’s fight night in Sacramento, as top-ranked Germaine de Randamie defends her number one status against the divisions fastest rising prospect Aspen Ladd.

The prize for the winner is most likely a fight with the double-champ Amanda Nunes in an eventual bantamweight title fight, but we say most likely because Nunes could just as easily defend her featherweight title against the winner of Cyborg-Spencer instead of heading into a bantamweight contest next.

Thus is the dilemma with a champ-champ environment in the UFC. While Nunes has certainly earned every chance she’s gotten and having two titles is incredibly beneficial to her career, use this weekend’s event as an example of the rippling effect one person attempting to hold down two weight classes has.

Nunes and the winner of de Randamie-Ladd will have fought one week apart, meaning if everyone comes out healthy then they should be matched up sometime before the end of 2019 in a perfect world.

But the world isn’t perfect and if Nunes fights the winner of Cyborg-Spencer next then the winner of de Randamie-Ladd either has to wait (in a division where neither is getting paid enough where that would be ideal or even feasible) or fight again to pay the bills, risking their status as the next challenger.

So how are we supposed to assign value to this event?

Not only are the stakes unclear when they should be entirely clear, but Ladd has never even appeared on a UFC main card heading into this fight.

de Randamie has only appeared in one UFC main event, although it was a featherweight title clash in which she won, but that event didn’t make her a marketable star.

Due to several controversies within the fight, de Randamie went from anonymous to hated, but not in the Floyd Mayweather type of way where everybody will tune in to watch her get her ass kicked, and even then, most people have forgotten about it altogether.

One could argue that the return of Urijah Faber in the co-main event against Ricky Simon is the real main event, especially since it’s happening in Faber’s hometown of Sacramento. But if that’s the case, then why isn’t that the actual main event?

If Faber is your most marketable star and the end-game is to get people to subscribe/watch, then you have to understand that since Faber isn’t the actual main event, when you sign into ESPN+, it’ll be de Randamie and Ladd’s anonymous faces staring at potential subscribers/viewers instead of the familiar butt chin of Faber.

You may think “what’s the big deal?” but trust me when I say that who you put in that photo matters.

If people recognize Faber’s face, click on the thumbnail, begin watching the event and just happen to watch the de Randamie-Ladd fight in the co-main event, you have a better chance of establishing some sort of visible path for them with audiences later, than if you have de Randamie-Ladd in the thumbnail, casual audiences skip over them because they don’t know who they are, and the entire event, including their fight, goes by the wayside and is never seen.

In a world where the UFC is on-demand most of the time, the downside is that viewers have to make a literal choice to watch it. There is no more stumbling onto the product. Nobody who doesn’t already know de Randamie and Ladd is going to stumble on their fight this weekend.

If the UFC doesn’t get them on some ESPN platforms and start marketing this fight as the next contender for the big star Amanda Nunes, then nobody will get hooked that way either.

The UFC won’t do any of that storytelling either because for starters, why would they (come on now) and as explained above, even they don’t know if saying the de Randamie-Ladd winner is getting a title shot next is a true statement.

This a curious, curious world we are living in where events happen in a vacuum and it is unclear what any of it means, until it eventually does mean something but the only people who care are the ones who didn’t need to be sold in the first place.

I can’t think of an event that encapsulates the vicious cycle the ESPN deal could potentially put the UFC in better than this weekends, in terms of how to use one fight card to set up a future one.

What do these fight nights mean (other than content creation)? How does this all work together? Who is watching this? What happens when your old fans stop watching (as Dana White constantly tells them to do when they push back on the quality of cards) but you don’t have new ones stumbling on the product to replace them?

None of this is new per se. The Fox deal set the UFC down this path of fight nights that run together into a whirlwind blend of beige, with everyone wearing the same shorts, fighting in random cities that often have no ties to the participants and just pumping out fight after fight.

But it does feel different in the ESPN era as the product heads further and further behind pay walls and only time will tell what that really means.