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COLUMN: Mixed Martial Arts, a One Horse Race? What Strikeforce is doing to compete (and survive doing so)
Feb 3, 2010 - 10:58:45 PM COLUMN: Mixed Martial Arts, a One Horse Race? What Strikeforce is doing to compete (and survive doing so)

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By Steve Sutcliffe, MMATorch columnist

"I did a radio interview with XM radio... they said "you can swear on XM radio." No sh*t, cause nobody can hear it. You can swear in the woods, too!"
-Mitch Hedberg

Strikeforce: Miami was the promotion's way of kicking off 2010 with a bang on Showtime.

You had the major promotion debut of heavyweight prospect Bobby Lashley, a former WWE superstar and current TNA wrestler who had previously stopped Bob Sapp and Jason Guida, Clay's brother, both in the first round. Lashley's opponent was Wes Sims, a guy best known for getting disqualified against Frank Mir for stomping a down opponent and acting as the practical joker on the most recent season of The Ultimate Fighter.

Former NFL player and Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker was making his MMA debut at the ripe old age of 47 against an unknown who was more than 20 years his junior.

Strikeforce wisely picked the date and location to coincide with the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl, hoping to capitalize on the influx of sports media who were in town for the games. And for serious fans of the sport, the card featured not one, but two title fights. Cris Cybog was going to defend the Women's Featherweight Championship in perhaps her most heated contest to date against Dutch submission specialist Marloes Coenen.

The vacant Welterweight Championship was on the line between Nizk Diaz and Marius Zaromskis. The undercard was rounded out by Jay Hieron and Joe Riggers, the winner perhaps in line for a short at the Welterweight belt.

Title matches, major promotion debuts, female fighters, "freak show" bouts - what was not to like? The good news: ratings were up 52 percent compared to the December 15 Strikeforce show. The bad news? The replay of UFC 107 which aired as counter-programming on Spike TV, had four times as many viewers.

Right now, Strikeforce is cursing in the woods known as Showtime and no one can hear them.

The fight between Strikeforce: Miami event and the replay of UFC 107 was anything but fair. Showtime is a premium cable channel that is available in 12 million homes nationwide. On the other hand, Spike TV is a basic cable channel with a potential audience base of almost 100 million homes. Do the math and you can see that percentage-wise, the comparison tilts in the opposite direction. Based on the ratings, 4 percent of homes that have Showtime watched Strikeforce while only 2.2 percent of the homes that receive Spike TV watched the replay of UFC 107.

But that perhaps is small comfort when you are the second largest promotion by default. Want further proof that Strikeforce is a second-class citizen? The biggest reactions from the often sedate live crowd was for UFC Welterweight champ Georges St. Pierre and recent Strikeforce acquisition Dan Henderson, who has a total of zero fights in the promotion. The audience was far less enthusiastic for homegrown stars like Cung Le.

This isn't to say that Strikeforce is doomed or that there is absolutely no appetite for an MMA product outside of UFC. The first Strikeforce event that aired on CBS averaged a healthy 4.04 million viewers, easily beating UFC's counter-programming.

If Strikeforce is to flourish on a national basis, and not just in the San Jose, Calif. area, the promotion is going to need a more consistent television vehicle than their current deal with Showtime and a lukewarm commitment from CBS.

Do you think the UFC would still be around today if Grifin-Bonnar I aired on Starz instead of Spike? Maybe if every Showtime event featured five must-see match of the year candidates it would make a difference, but word of mouth can only go so far if about 1 percent of people in America get the channel.

They'll also need to commit themselves to building their own stars from the ground up who can become big draws in their own right and not because of what they did in some other promotion that's viewed as more major league. Unfortunately, it looks like Strikeforce's biggest home grown star, Gina Carano, is likely to pursue an acting career rather than go back into fighting.

It's also far too early to tell if the Fedor is going to work out in the long-run, but at least he will be headlining the next CBS broadcast against Fabricio Werdum set for April. Dan Henderson will get some exposure for the promotion when he steps into the cage. The problem is that is if he tears through the roster without breaking a sweat, he can potentially expose Strikeforce as not being competitive.

There's no quick fix solution or business strategy for Strikeforce and company founder Scott Coker; they'll have to continue to put on entertaining fights while working with the limited television resources at their disposal.

One missed opportunity that people may point to is the Carano-Cyborg fight airing on Showtime instead of CBS or even pay-per-view, but that decision was probably made with a ton of pressure coming from the network side.

One thing they wisely haven't done is thrown tons of money at every single fighter that gets cut by UFC or has a falling out with Dana White. With the Fedor and Henderson deals being rare exceptions, Coker has been keen on operating the company with a conservative amount of overhead expenses. Only time will tell if Strikeforce flourishes or if it joins Dana White's collection of defunct MMA company tombstones.

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Steve Sutcliffe is putting together a brand-new MMA group that will be so totally unlike Elite XC, Affliction, bodogFIGHT and the IFL. Send investment inquiries to steve.w.sutcliffe@gmail.com.

[Gina Carano art credit Cory Gould (c) MMATorch]