Ennis' Take
ENNIS: The Case for Merging the UFC and WEC, while acknowledging the case against
Aug 13, 2009 - 9:25:46 PM ENNIS: The Case for Merging the UFC and WEC, while acknowledging the case against

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By Shawn Ennis, MMATorch Senior Columnist

Some will tell you that the time has come for the UFC to absorb WEC and its fighters and lower weight classes. I disagree, but the time will come. If you're asking me, this definitely needs to happen, but only when the circumstances are right.

The arguments for making the Featherweight (145 lb) and Bantamweight (135 lb) and the soon-to-be-added Flyweight (125 lb) classes part of the UFC are many. Most significantly, fighters like Mike Brown, Urijah Faber, Miguel Torres, Brian Bowles, Jose Aldo, Joseph Benavidez, etc. deserve to be recognized on the grandest stage of them all in MMA. That's not happening right now. Sure, Zuffa owns WEC. But the exposure on a card, no matter how spectacular, that airs on Versus rather than Spike or a UFC pay-per-view is minimal. And when your exposure is minimal, so is your pay. These fighters may be making more than they could were they fighting in a smaller North American promotion, but they're not making nearly what their heavier UFC counterparts are pulling in. The entire payout for this past Sunday's WEC card was $234,500 – a pittance when compared to what some top UFC fighters make by themselves.

But just bringing these guys into the UFC right now would cause more problems than solutions. The UFC puts on a ton of events as it is, and as a promotion, you can't just showcase top talent all the time. When you only have top fighters fighting at all of your events, when do you build up the next generation of contenders? How does Jon Jones get hyped up if there's no room for him on a card? The answer is that he doesn't. So in order for the UFC to even think about bringing in more weight divisions (and thus more fighters), they've got to put on more events. More fight cards means selling more fight cards. Selling more fight cards means more marketable main events. And right now, they have a hard enough time coming up with main events for some of the cards that are already scheduled. There are plenty of guys who need to be built up and showcased, but not always enough of those guys who can conceivably sell a show.

The obvious answer here is that if you've got more weight divisions (feather-, bantam-, and flyweight for example,) you've got more titles, and thus more main events. But it's not that simple. You can't just throw Mike Brown vs. Jose Aldo into the main event for UFC 104 and say, "Hey! See this guy here? This is the best Featherweight in the world. And he's fighting a top five Featherweight in the world for the most meaningful Featherweight title in MMA. You should watch!" No, when you add classes to the promotion, you've got to build them up first. When the UFC brought back the lightweight division in 2006, they staged fights for a good 6-7 months before the title fight even happened. The addition of WEC's weight classes may go down differently since they're not exactly building from scratch, but the point remains that the weight classes still have to be built.

So the question remains, how does this happen? Like I said before, I think it will, but I think it will be preceded by something bigger. I think that before you see WEC fighters in the Octagon, you'll see a network deal getting done. I'm not saying that as if neither thing will ever happen – in fact, I think they'll probably both happen within the next two years, if not sooner.

As previously mentioned, there's not enough room on the current number of UFC cards for more weight classes to be featured. But a network deal will mean that more fight cards are needed. You may even see a season or two of The Ultimate Fighter that centers around one or more of the 145 and lower weight classes before the network deal begins so that there's some recognizable names for the undercards. That could lead into some showcase fights for some of the upper-tier talent that the divisions have to offer, and suddenly you've got marketable fighters. On top of TUF, we'll almost certainly see a few UFC Unleashed episodes centered around the smaller weight classes, building up the top fighters in those divisions. But the point is that when more cards are needed, more fighters will be needed, which means more stars will be made, more money will be paid to those stars, and sooner or later the UFC has plenty of titleholders so that we can have a title fight on pretty much every PPV. And isn't that what we all want?

Personally, I hope this happens very soon. Guys like Miguel Torres, his recent loss notwithstanding, don't come along every day. He and Urijah Faber, not to mention the titleholders in their respective divisions, are stars waiting to be exposed to the masses. So hopefully this elusive network deal goes down soon, or at least some development happens to where more fight cards are needed. These guys deserve the hype and they deserve the higher pay.

So after this happens, what do you do with WEC? There's an argument to be made that it's good for the UFC to have its own farm system, but is it really necessary? With all the smaller promotions out there, Zuffa can let the other guys give fighters the time and experience they need to get ready for the big time. It may be nice to have a built-in league to pick and choose from, but the time and effort may not be worth the end results. After all, if you've got a choice between getting Fighter A after you develop him in your own "minor league," which you pay for and promote yourself, or picking Fighter A up from King of the Cage and Total Combat after he's compiled a 8-0 record (which costs you nothing), which would you pick?

It's my hope, and I don't think I'm alone, that we'll see all the greatest talent in the world in all weight divisions in one place. The easier MMA is to follow, the more popular it will be (which is a whole other subject in and of itself.) There's a reason that you don't see other successful football or basketball leagues. It's too much trouble to keep track of who is where and who would beat whom were they ever to play each other. People want all the best in one place. And as long as WEC is separate from the UFC, the best lighter weight fighters in the world won't get the recognition they deserve.