In recent weeks, mixed martial arts fans have been blessed and perhaps cursed with a large amount of action. The UFC alone has held six fight cards between August and September, while Bellator and the World Series of Fighting have sprinkled in their own events as well. Since the Ultimate Fighting Championship is the big group in the business, many fans only tune into its cards to satisfy their MMA fix. But the question is beginning to loom: are those cards too long for their liking? There’s only so much action that one person can watch, and perhaps it’s time for the UFC to cut down on the length of its cards.
UFC 165 took place in Toronto, Canada and featured 13 bouts, the first of which started in the early evening and aired on Facebook. Those preliminary bouts started at 6 pm, and the event came to a close well after midnight. The viewers who watched the whole show would have watched six hours of fighting before either heading off to bed or traveling out into the world for some sort of social life. When looking across the mainstream sports world, the standard amount of time for a sporting event is two to three hours. Auto races such as NASCAR and special events like the Super Bowl tend to be longer than that. So, it’s clear that the UFC is towards the top of the spectrum when it comes to time that must be dedicated to catch their whole event.
The two Wednesday Fox Sports 1 cards that were recently held both started while many fans were still at work, which caused them to miss a large portion of the action.
The question must be asked of whether this has the potential to have a negative affect on the promotion as a whole. The people in power within the UFC have made it clear that they will continue to add more fight cards to fill their television obligations and pay-per-view needs. If each event features double digit amounts of fights, that creates a large number of action to be consumed. It’s a matter of time before the preliminary Fox Sports 1 and Facebook fights begin to feel some of the blowback as both casual and hardcore fans allot more of their time to either the main card fights or individuals of special interest. This will hurt the UFC, because these fights are used to develop fighters into the bigger names in the sport, but if their viewership drops, so does the number of people who know or care about those athletes.
A potential solution would be for the UFC to cut fight cards down to 6-8 fights total, and use those matchups that would be preliminary bouts on a weekly “Friday Night Fights”-style showcase. Removing The Ultimate Fighter from circulation and replacing it with a weekly 60-minute event could give the UFC a chance to build up fighters’ names while slowly converting fans. The overhead of hosting such events could be costly, but perhaps the UFC could use venues such as their gym in Las Vegas as the weekly fight card location to help cut down on event costs. The goal would be to generate a small amount of revenue, while giving the lesser-known stars a chance to shine on cards of their own.
Sitting in front of a television for five to six hours is a difficult task, even when watching a sport that is as enjoyable as mixed martial arts. By cutting down the number of fights on a card, the UFC could perhaps increase the interest in their roster, rather than making some of the earlier bouts “expendable” for viewers.
Why not just skip the preliminary fights, or at least the pre-preliminary fights? A lot of people show up late to the live event.