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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief The bout between Kimbo Slice and Roy Nelson is set to air on tonight's episode of The Ultimate Fighter, and the anticipation has reached a fever pitch the likes of which the show has never seen.
Dana White is predicting six million people tune in for tonight's broadcast, which would blow out the debut episode's viewership by a million fans. Keeping those viewers for the rest of the season will be the challenge after Kimbo's fight tonight.
The fight already took place, and the comments said by both fighters this week and Nelson's coach on the show Rashad Evans suggests that it was a good one. Kimbo said that it was his best fight, and that he has "nothing to cry about." Whether that means he won or lost is something we'll find out tonight, but in all honesty it's a fight that Roy Nelson should win.
Nelson is the more technically sound fighter and has fought bigger names and better fighters than Kimbo is or that Kimbo has faced, and it's a fight he should take if he wants to be taken seriously as a threat to UFC heavyweights.
Kimbo simply needs a promising showing in this fight, so that win or lose he gives fans a reason to believe he's more than a sideshow. From what's been said it sounds like he's done just that.
So the next thing to look out for once this episode airs is just how many fans are brought in. If the UFC hits 6 million viewers for a non live fight on cable television, that's going to set a watermark for Strikeforce as they bring their brand to CBS in November. If they can't get that many people hyped up to watch Fedor fight for free it will be seen as a failure in marketing the fight, and the UFC will always have the rating from this Kimbo v. Nelson fight to tote over anything they do on CBS.
I think Roy Nelson wins this fight that airs tonight, but I would be pleasantly surprised to see Kimbo prove Dana White and a large group of fans, myself included, that wrote him off last year. He's getting the bad taste left by EliteXC out of many mouths with his appearance on this show, and a win over Nelson here would nearly erase that memory and place him as a legit fighter in MMA and not simply a backyard brawler.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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