Rich Hansen's Take
HANSEN: UFC 177, Why Lack of Undercard Depth is UFC's Biggest Expansion Problem
Jul 16, 2014 - 4:05:24 PM HANSEN: UFC 177, Why Lack of Undercard Depth is UFC's Biggest Expansion Problem

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By: Rich Hansen, MMATorch Columnist

I get what the UFC is doing with UFC 177, I really do. Well, I don't get why they would continue to book pay-per-view cards that are only one or two fights deep less than three months after Bellator's pay-per-view sold more units UFC 174, but I get why they chose to put two title fights on the card.

It's like this: what if the UFC went with, say, Jacare vs. Gegard Mousasi in the co-main event slot? If you remember, when the UFC chose to "postpone" UFC 176 after Jose Aldo vs. Chad Mendes got postponed due to steroids, injuries, supplements, or "deez nuts," Jacare vs. Mousasi would have been the main event fight. The UFC couldn't put together a bigger fight than that one on a few weeks notice, so they responded by "postponing" the card (the excessive quotes are for you, Mr. Ennis).

So, let's say the top two fights on UFC 177 would have been T.J. Dillashaw vs. Renan Barao for the UFC Bantamweight Championship, with a co-main event fight between Jacare and Gegard Mousasi. And then come August 20, Dillashaw or Barao pull up lame with an injury to "deez nuts." The UFC has already told the MMA World that Jacare vs. Mousasi is not pay-per-view main event worthy, meaning that the UFC would have to strongly consider canceling two pay-per-view events in the same month. Nope, no over-saturation problem here.

If you look at the rest of the UFC 177 card, you've got a semi-interesting UFC Fight Pass card. Sorry, I mean a semi-interesting UFC Fight Pass Prelim card. For 1 in the morning. Check out the remainder of the card as it stands today:

Bethe Correia vs. Shayna Baszler
Tony Ferguson vs. Danny Castillo
Ruan Potts vs. Anthony Hamilton
Ramsey Nijem vs. Carlos Diego Ferreira
Yancy Medeiros vs. Justin Edwards
Lorenz Larkin vs. Derek Brunson

The fight fans of Puerto Rico will go crazy for this sometime in 2015. However, other than the Ferguson fight, does anything there belong even on Fox Sports 1, let alone pay-per-view? Yeah, didn't think so.

So before the announcement yesterday that Chris Cariaso, or as Dustin Ortiz calls him, "Chris Carudgfiufsdgo or however you say his name," will be challenging Demetrious Johnson for the UFC Flyweight Championship, the nominal co-main event was the poor man's tully Blanchard versus the very poor man's Dusty Rhodes. The UFC absolutely needed to add more to the card to buffer themselves against an injury to Dillashaw or Barao. But the fight they chose was poor, because Johnson has some seriously negative drawing power as a PPV main event. He's a known negative, which can only be considered worse than an unknown quantity. After all, how much worse could any other main event fight be than "the fight that got out drawn by Bellator?" To drive the point home a little more thoroughly, when Johnson defended his championship at UFC 174 against someone whose last name was unpronounceable by Dustin Ortiz, they sold somewhere between 85,000 to 125,000 pay-per-view units. The last time they sold so miserably, the late Justin Eilers was in the main event. I'll let you absorb that and just start a new paragraph.

OK, I'm back.

In other words, if the fight between Dillashaw goes tits up and can't be replaced, the UFC's backup plan is to headline with the guy who has proven to be the worst drawing champion in the history of the company, against the least deserving title challenger in the history of the company. Don't believe me? Think I'm being unfair? Cariaso is a very capable flyweight fighter, and I like his game, but here's Cariaso's Zuffa resume, in chronological order:


A decision win over Rafael Rebello

A submission loss to Renan Barao

A decision win to Will Campuzano in his UFC debut

A decision loss to Michael McDonald

Back to back decision wins over Vaughan Lee and Takeya Mizugaki.

After dropping to flyweight, he earned a decision win over Josh Ferguson

Consecutive losses to John Moraga and Jussier Formiga

Three wins in a row over the murderers row of Iliarde Santos (TKO), Danny Martinez (decision), and Louis Smolka

Like I said, he's a very capable fighter. Maybe even a top-15 fighter. But it's easy to argue that his bantamweight record is superior to his flyweight resume. It's also easy to argue that there are seven current flyweights more deserving of this fight, and each of them would do no worse at the gate and in pay-per-view sales:


1.) Zach Makovsky *
2.) Jussier Formiga *
3.) Kyoji Horiguchi
4.) Brad Pickett **
5.) Ian McCall **
6.) John Lineker
7.) Dustin Ortiz

* - Makovsky and Formiga are scheduled to fight on August 16, and are both in camp. There's no reason the UFC couldn't have canceled (sorry, postponed...), that fight and moved one or the other to the championship bout. Formiga does hold a victory over Cariaso, after all.

** - The UFC announced the Johnson fight on Tuesday because UFC 177 tickets went on sale today. But since they moved the UFC 173 on-sale back a couple weeks when that event went tits up, there's no reason they couldn't push the UFC 177 ticket on-sale back a week to see who wins the fight between McCall and Pickett. I mean, it's not like this card is going to sell out over the course of one week, right?

This list doesn't include John Moraga, who holds a win over Cariaso, nor does it include Joseph Benavidez, who is his own unique case right now, as both lost to Johnson just last year.

As long as the UFC is determined to put on close to 600 fights a year, they're going to continue to run into situations like this. UFC 177 is anorexic. UFC 173 got jumbled around multiple times. UFC 174 shattered the glass floor (is that a thing?) of pay-per-view buys. UFC 176 got postponed.

And there's another thing. Let me rant here briefly. If UFC 176 was "postponed" and not canceled, then I challenge the UFC to run an event in the winter and call it "UFC 176: Postponed," out of sequential order of the rest of the shows. Want to confuse your fanbase even more than you do when you run shows on pay-per-view, Fox, FS1, FS2, FX, Fight Pass, and Facebook? Just run a show entitled UFC 176 three weeks after you run a show entitled UFC 184. I triple dog dare you.

There's just no other conclusion that can be drawn than this; the UFC is running too many events. Cards which used to be seven fights deep are now three fights deep. Why did UFC 175, with Ronda Rousey and Chris Weidman in the top two fights only draw a third of what a comparable top two would have done five years ago? Is it because the MMA bubble is burst? Or, as I believe, is it because the depth of the cards supporting those top two fights is too weak? When a pay-per-view is going to run $55 (or more, I'm looking at you UFC 168), it's going to take more than two fights to get people to open their wallets.