Jul 22, 2011 - 4:30:47 PM

By: Shawn Ennis, MMATorch Senior Columnist

If you look at any number of MMA websites, every now and again someone will bring up the topic of what MMA, and the UFC in particular, needs to do in order to get to the "next level"; to hit the "mainstream," as it were. Most of the time those columns have to do with distribution and availability of the product. Those things are certainly significant to what I'm going to talk about, but I want to go in a slightly different direction: I think the UFC needs to learn how to better sell their shows.

I did something this past Sunday that I haven't done in about eight years. I ordered a WWE pay-per-view. There are those out there reading this who think that pro-wrestling references have no place in an MMA column. Those people don't realize that a huge part of any sport (let alone combat sport) is promotion, and if there's one industry that has mastered the art of promotion, it's pro wrestling.

But that's a column for another day. I'm not going to get into the storyline that sucked me into this show that I bought. If you're a fan you know about it, and if you're not, you don't care. So let's just get to why I'm mentioning it in the first place. I didn't buy the show because I thought there was going to be a good match in the main event. I thought that was probably the case (and it turned out to be true), but that wasn't the main selling point. The main selling point was that I cared what was going on, and I had to see what happened.

That's something that has, with very few exceptions, completely eluded the UFC. They're great at putting together video packages, telling us why and how this or that fighter can win, why this or that fight is going to be action-packed, etc. But they are terrible at making people care about things that aren't obviously important, and even about some things that are. And what's arguably even worse is that they are sorely lacking when it comes to getting across the fact that the live crowd cares as well.

Leading up to the WWE event that aired this past Sunday, there were a few weeks of buildup on the weekly television show that WWE airs, which eventually hit its crescendo last Monday. The viewer knew going in that the guy who usually garnered mostly cheers was going to be booed out of the building by a partisan crowd who would be going crazy for their hometown guy. The fans in Chicago knew that if their guy won (the one who's usually booed), he was leaving the promotion as champion (or at least that was the storyline), and that's what they wanted to have happen.

At UFC 132, the Bantamweight Championship was defended for the first time in the UFC. Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber, the two combatants who would contest this inaugural title fight, don't like each other. The buildup to the most important bantamweight fight in MMA history is pretty much summed up in those two sentences.

If you're reading this site, you probably knew at least a little something about both fighters. But you are a unique breed. Very few people outside of the sphere of hardcore fans knew who either guy was, and very few of them cared who was going to win. That's also the difference between most of the people who order every UFC pay-per-view and those who pick and choose. If it's me, I don't have to care who's going to win. I love watching the fights. I see things that the casual viewer doesn't. I know lots of things about fighters of whom the casual fan has never heard.

That's not saying anything good about me or bad about them – it's just the way it is. But if you're looking to bring in the biggest audience for any sport, people need to have a rooting interest. No one outside of the UFC's hardcore base bought the Rampage Jackson vs. Rashad Evans card saying, "I don't care who wins; I just want a good fight." They said, "I want to see Rampage beat the crap out of Evans." (Or the other way around, but probably not for the most part).

Whether or not the thing people root for actually happens is completely immaterial. This is actually where not having control over the outcomes of fights is an advantage for the UFC. If things don't go down the way you want in pro wrestling, you blame it on the promotion, and there's a possibility of fans becoming jaded and resentful. If something doesn't happen the way you want in a fight (or a game, etc.) there's always next time.

The trick to all this is that giving the people a rooting interest doesn't come easy. In order to build interest, there has got to be easy access to information. You need to build backstories. We need to know who these fighters are, and why we should or shouldn't care about them. No one becomes a star without being accessible (or at least giving the illusion of accessibility), and combat sports are predicated on stars. To tie that all together, you don't root for (or against) a fighter you don't care about, and if enough people care about a guy enough to root for or against him, that person is a star.

To give an example, let's look at Anderson Silva. How long have we known here in the land of hardcore that Anderson Silva was one of the two or three best fighters in the world? How long have we scrambled to order shows when he fights? And yet, Anderson Silva was not a star until Chael Sonnen came along. Chael Sonnen made people care about watching Anderson Silva fight. Whether you wanted to see him win or lose, you cared. And when we saw the best fighter in the world (for my money) take a beating for four rounds only to come back and win out of nowhere in the fifth, that was when Anderson Silva arrived. Greatness is not enough. Billing a guy as the best in the world does nothing for you if no one knows who he is or what he's about.

So building a rooting interest is a big part of what the UFC is missing. It's quite possibly the biggest part. But there's more to the story, and instead of dragging this out into an unmanageably long piece, I'll be back with more on the subject next week.

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