Ennis' Take
ENNIS: Bellator - Quietly Doing (Almost) Everything Right
Jun 9, 2009 - 7:24:55 AM ENNIS: Bellator - Quietly Doing (Almost) Everything Right

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As you may or may not know, Joe Soto became Bellator Fighting Championships' first Featherweight champion on Friday night. His coronation as champion was the result of the first of four tournaments (Featherweight, Lightweight, Welterweight, Middleweight. The other three will conclude in the next few weeks.) Soto took out Henry Martinez, highly-touted (and presumed by many to be the tourney favorite) Wilson Reis, and Yahir Reyes, whose spectacular spinning backfist KO of Estevan Payan is my current favorite for Knockout of the Year. Now, if you haven't been watching Bellator, you don't know who Joe Soto is. But if you have, Soto is a star. And that's what Bellator is doing right. It's also what ESPN is doing wrong.

Don't worry – I'll explain.

The Good

A fight promotion cannot survive without stars. You can put on good fights all you want, but if no one knows who's fighting, they're not going to watch. And so for any promotion to survive, they need someone smart making the important decisions. By going with the tournament format to crown their inaugural champions, Bellator gives their champs instant credibility, as they're all 3-0 in the promotion. That's a smart way to start out. Another testament to the promotion's intelligence is the decision to air taped broadcasts. Now before you shout me down, hear me out.

Let's go back to Bellator's first broadcast. In your first broadcast, you've got to entice people to watch, and you've also got to put on an entertaining show so that they have a reason to come back. As I said before, no one wants to watch an unknown fight (and by "no one", I mean the casual fans. I know the hardcore crazies watch everything. I'm one of them, after all.) So what did Bellator do in its first broadcast? Their two most recognizable fighters were Eddie Alvarez and Jorge Masvidal. Both men fought on the first show, and it was made known that they were in opposite brackets of the lightweight tournament, which of course meant that they could fight in the finals. In addition, you had the rest of the opening round of the lightweight and featherweight tournaments. So the seeds are planted for future recognition with guys on the show like Joe Soto, Yahir Reyes and Toby Imada (who would dazzle in his next appearance with the leading submission of the year candidate over Masvidal.) The other fights on the show were also solid, so that also helped Bellator's cause. At this point though, the tournament fights were the only ones shown, and a smart promotion is going to show the fights in their entirety (I'm looking at you, old IFL syndicated programming,) especially fights that are relevant to finding the first champion.

That doesn't speak to the wisdom of taped broadcasts, but how about in later weeks, when the tournament was in later rounds and there were fewer tournament fights to show? Bellator doesn't have a ton of name recognition, so no one is going to be outraged if Fighter A or Fighter B doesn't show up on the televised card in a non-tourney fight. In that case, you tape your fights the night before, you show your tournament fights, and then you pick the most exciting bouts and air them. Case in point, Bellator had a fight on their May 1st card between Justin Edwards and John Troyer that was second on the card that night. It was an excellent fight that wouldn't have made a live broadcast unless there was time left over. In an environment where you never know who your breakout stars will be, you want to give exciting fighters every chance to get on the air. That's what a delayed broadcast does. (And seriously, the fights typically air the next day. It's not like old-school Pride events or something.) For the opposite example, do you think Strikeforce would have kept Whitehead-Randleman on the main broadcast of their Lawler-Shields card if they could have gotten two or three exciting undercard fights in its place? I don't.

Intelligence at the top is probably the most important ingredient for a promotion's success, but you also need good matchmaking, good scouting, and good luck. The fact that there has been nary a clunker on any of the Bellator shows that I've seen (I missed two of them) is a testament to all three of those attributes. Of course, the given here is distribution and a backer that is financially secure. Since the promotion is essentially run by ESPN, neither of those is an issue.

The Not-As-Good

This is an admittedly short list, but it's here nonetheless. Why in the world is there no English language broadcast of these fights on ESPN or ESPN2? The fights have been pulling excellent ratings on Deportes, which isn't available in a lot of homes. That's got to be an indicator of what it can do for one of the major channels. And you know there's some programming that isn't exactly setting the world on fire which could easily be replaced by Bellator. The best move they could make is to replay the current season's shows with the English commentary (which has been airing on Bellator's website with Jon Anik and Jason Chambers) on ESPN or the Deuce to familiarize viewers with the promotion's champions before starting the second season. There's no way this wouldn't be huge if they did it right. A few mentions on Sportscenter, then weekly broadcasts leading up to the next season is a can't-miss prospect. The problem is that if they show the second season without showing the first on the Worldwide Leader or its sister network, all the good that's been built up during the first season would be lost on a potentially huge audience.

All in all, Bellator has done everything right on their end thus far. The only thing remaining is to get the English-speaking suits on board and get this show on the bigger networks while keeping it going on Deportes. Bellator is good for Hispanic fight fans, it's good for English-speaking fight fans, and it's good for MMA. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out.