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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief Talk about counter-programming. The UFC announced Wednesday that this Saturday on Spike TV, six of the "most exciting" bouts from last month's UFC 100 pay-per-view will air in their entirety in a special two and a half hour presentation starting at 10PM ET.
This program will go head to head with Strikeforce's live Carano vs. Cyborg event on Showtime. In fact, scheduled to air right along with Strikeforce's main event will be the Brock Lesnar vs. Frank Mir main event from the card.
Some bouts that did not make the pay-per-view broadcast will also be featured, so fans who did not pay extra at UFC.com to see the undercard bouts will get their first chance to see a few of these fights, including the Stephan Bonnar vs. Mark Coleman bout. The full list of fights to air on Saturday is below:
"Heavyweight Championship Bout
Brock Lesnar vs. Frank Mir
Middleweights
Dan Henderson vs. Michael Bisping
Middleweights
Alan Belcher vs. Yoshihiro Akiyama
Light Heavyweights
Stephan Bonnar vs. Mark Coleman
Penick's Analysis: By adding the Coleman-Bonnar fight as well as the Jones-O'Brien fight, there's quite the possibility that this could really damage the overall viewership for the Strikeforce show. It hasn't been hyped up to what it's billing should have warranted with how built up Carano and Cyborg were on CBS last year, and with the Fedor distraction and all of the bad luck they've had with the rest of the card it's already going to suffer. This adds an extra bullet wound or two to this continually damaged card, as the main event that a lot of people are interested in may be skipped over by a lot of people to check out the UFC 100 stuff on Spike. It's a bit odd for the UFC to give away so much so soon after an event, but Strikeforce simply finds themselves in the same cross-hairs EliteXC and Affliction did when trying to compete with the UFC. The numbers from this show will be very interesting to see next week.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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