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Brett Rogers and Fedor Emelianenko face off on Saturday from the Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates, IL, in front of what Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker believes will be a sold out crowd, as well as a national television audience on CBS. While the fight will be watched by hardcore MMA fans, the question for the past month has been "are Strikeforce, Showtime and CBS doing enough to promote the event?" With five days to go until the fight, I'm not sure they have been to this point.
Sure, they've had some good spots on CBS programming during college football, NFL and other shows as well, but the spots aren't enough to sell the fight to the casual fan base. They've tried to introduce Fedor with the comments thrown in that he's considered the best heavyweight in the world, but without having the footage at their disposal to show what he's done the Fedor angle simply isn't enough.
There are three fighters sorely underutilized in trying to sell this card, they being Rogers, Jake Shields and Jason "Mayhem" Miller. While Rogers has been shown as the opponent, with some clips of his fights on EliteXC and Showtime, he's not being used enough. Rogers could sell this fight with Fedor himself, with the intro comments on what Fedor means to the hardcore fanbase being a backdrop for him to say why he's going to prove otherwise on Saturday night. Outside of media calls, we haven't really heard a word from Brett as far as CBS is concerned.
The same goes with Shields and Miller. The two of them are in the night's co-main event, fighting for a Strikeforce Title belt, and if you've only seen the TV spots hyping Fedor on CBS then you wouldn't know this fight is taking place. It's a highly unfortunate oversight on the part of Showtime and CBS because both would have been assets in selling their bout as something worth seeing on Saturday night as well.
Showtime is taking some steps tonight with the airing of the 24/7-esque "Fight Camp 360" special on Rogers and Fedor, but is it too little too late? For one, the people who will watch it on Showtime were likely already going to be tuning in on Saturday, and the people they need to grab to make Fedor's U.S. television debut are the ones who maybe haven't ever seen him fight outside of the highlights.
To bring in 3.5-4 million viewers, which should be seen as a mark to hit to be considered successful on Saturday night, I don't know that they've gotten enough out there over the past few weeks. Now, they've taken an "easy does it" approach thus far, and we may simply be getting a hard sell in the next few days during their primetime programming schedule, but to this point simply not enough has been done. They just could have done more. Now, maybe it will prove to be enough, or maybe Fedor's mystique will be a selling point of it's own on free TV where it wasn't on pay-per-view. We'll find out after Saturday, but hopefully we'll see a much more aggressive hard sell out of all three organizations in the next five days to get as many eyes onto the product as possible.
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