UFC in 2014: What We Learned from the Year That Was
2014 was not the best year for MMA. In particular, it wasn’t the best year for the UFC, but as goes the biggest tree in the forest, so goes the rest of the forest.
It was a bizarre year rife with injuries, discontent among fighters and fans and even the occasional bout of litigation being threatened (or pending). These are not exactly the foundational components of a positive 365-day run.
You should also remember that we all learn things over the course of a year. The UFC learned some things, the fighters, fans and media learned some things, and the sport itself learned some things.
Here’s a list of a few of those things.
The Pace of 2014 Was Proven Unsustainable
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Many felt 2013 was one of the best years in the history of MMA. That was a matter of opinion.
Few felt 2014 was one of the best years in the history of MMA. That was not.
2014 was full of cards no one cared about, fights that had no excitement behind them and a whole bunch of other stuff that hurt the sport in different ways. Much of that could be traced back to the fact that the UFC was insistent to the point of stubbornness that it put on a card just about every week, whether said card was good or not.
The result was a miserable year full of events that didn’t need to happen, got cancelled (or perhaps should have been cancelled), and a sport that’s seen its cachet and pay-per-view revenue dip alarmingly for most of the year.
The game simply can’t withstand this type of aggressive cultivation of its resources, and that was proven repeatedly this year.
Fight Pass Shows Can Be a Big Deal
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That’s not to say there weren’t some pleasant surprises for the UFC in 2014 on the viewership front. This time a year ago, Fight Pass had just been released, and many thought it was a cash grab by the promotion.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but one thing is for sure: Events on the streaming service can be a big deal (and sometimes a huge deal).
Conor McGregor headlined an event in July that had the whole sport talking, and by the time the Irishman tooled Diego Brandao before his fellow countrymen, there was a genuine frenzy that had developed. It was the first time a star has really rocketed his value upward on the back of a performance on Fight Pass, but it won’t be the last.
With other bouts like Roy Nelson and Mark Hunt or Luke Rockhold and Michael Bisping having appeared exclusively online, it showed that appointment viewing can happen at your desktop, too.
Everyone involved should be happy about that.
The UFC Finally Has Tiers in Its Broadcasting
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Directly related to the idea that Fight Pass shows can be a big deal is the idea that the UFC has finally, almost halfway through its partnership with Fox Sports, established some rhyme or reason to the way it has built its broadcasts.
The promotion has put together a loose system of tiers for the product, one that should help differentiate quality to the viewers and underline why one event is $60 to watch while another is free to anyone willing to stay up late enough to see it on Fox Sports 1.
Fight Pass serves as a wild card, not necessarily linked to quality so much as to international settings and the differences in time. You may see something amazing there, or you may not. It all depends on how the schedule works.
But Fox Sports 1, a cable channel, is going to be the home for general contender bouts, the main Fox station will likely see exciting fights and bouts for No. 1 contendership and pay-per-view is going to be where title fights happen.
That’s a sensible step that should have happened much earlier, but it's here now.
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“Pound-for-Pound Great” Is Totally Meaningless Thanks to Dana White
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For a good while, there was a debate in MMA over who was the greatest pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. Most argued Anderson Silva, but others said it was Georges St-Pierre. Both were stars of the highest caliber in the sport, and there was a case to be made for either, but each man got there on merit.
They were great martial artists first. The pound-for-pound debate started after.
This was a point clearly lost on Dana White in 2014. With no obvious ways to promote generally uninteresting divisions and the champions often heading them, he simply began claiming that whoever was up next to defend his title was probably the pound-for-pound best in the sport.
Hey, it worked for Silva and GSP. Why not all these unknowns holding gold belts?
At different points this year, White said Renan Barao, Jon Jones and Anthony Pettis were all in contention for the illustrious title of pound-for-pound best in the sport, as though it was something he could definitively bestow upon an athlete as opposed to letting a man earn it by going undefeated for nearly a decade against the best fighters alive.
The result?
The phrase is basically meaningless now, or at least more meaningless than it ever was in the past.
Hopefully, it’s thrown around less frivolously in 2015.
This Generation's Stars Are the Least Impactful in a Long Time
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The pound-for-pound talk from White was born out of a reality that became very apparent in 2014: The stars of this generation are without question the least impactful that MMA has produced in a long time.
While there was the downtime in the early 2000s when really only Tito Ortiz was doing anything that got people excited for the UFC, all other points in the promotion’s history have been founded on stars.
The earliest days of the game had Royce Gracie building a legend against guys like Dan Severn, Ken Shamrock and even Tank Abbott.
When The Ultimate Fighter was getting off the ground, it was coached by icons Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell at a time when Ortiz was still around, and Matt Hughes, Rich Franklin and BJ Penn were stars.
Once that show wrapped, it had created literally dozens of stars for the UFC to go along with guys like Rampage Jackson, Wanderlei Silva, Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre to carry the torch (oh, and a little guy named Brock Lesnar).
The result was a sport with true buzz, fuelled by larger-than-life personalities who could back it up with exciting action in the cage.
The sport now has names like Jon Jones and Ronda Rousey, polarizing individuals who turn fewer heads in a three-month media blitz than Liddell would walking down the street in 2006.
It’s created some hard times for the UFC in finding people to market, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better in the near future.
Despite the Perils of the Game, Things May Be Improving
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If nothing else, though, the UFC looks to have learned what many others learned this year about the quality of the product, and they’re trying to rectify it.
December’s UFC 181 was sublime on paper and mostly delivered in practice, UFC 180 was salvaged by an interesting replacement main event after Cain Velasquez got hurt, UFC 179 was an abomination as announced but provided the best fight of the year in Jose Aldo-Chad Mendes II, and UFC 178 was a hardcore fan’s dream thanks to its triple main event.
Early 2015 looks to be building on that momentum. Jon Jones-Daniel Cormier, Anderson Silva-Nick Diaz, Ronda Rousey-Cat Zingano and Chris Weidman-Vitor Belfort are all going down before we get to March 1—and that’s only on pay-per-view.
Conor McGregor will be back in action, Alexander Gustafsson and Anthony Johnson will meet up, and guys like Dan Henderson, Matt Brown and Rashad Evans will all get back into the cage as well.
Nothing is guaranteed based on injuries and other unfortunate circumstances, so until the guys are in the cage touching gloves, one has to approach with caution. At least on paper, though, there’s reason to think the UFC has seen how far the product got off course in 2014 and is taking pains to improve.
It’s hard to ask for more than that.
The Sport Is Still Capable of Providing the Incredible
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Many will posit that those who have come to expect big shows from the UFC and are critical when it provides subpar events are essentially bitter, that these critics have little else on their plate besides complaining about the sport and the way it’s been run for the past year.
In actuality, however, those expectations come from being conditioned by the UFC to expect value from the product and to expect the best of the best in mixed martial arts. Even in a year as bad as 2014, the sport can still provide the incredible.
There were the skin-of-your-teeth battles of Johny Hendricks and Robbie Lawler, and Lawler’s remarkable redemption, which saw him end the year as an improbable UFC champion. There was the incredible stopping power of Anthony Pettis, for however rare it is that he enters the cage. There was the excellence of the aforementioned Aldo-Mendes rematch or the fact that McGregor worked as hard as anyone to promote that bout, and he wasn’t even involved in it.
Even if the theatre of the bizarre is what you prefer, what other sport could give the world the Chael Sonnen-Vitor Belfort-Wanderlei Silva circus or a pro wrestler randomly showing up on television to announce he’s competing on the biggest stage in the game? What other sport has its color commentator telling an athlete to quit and go home because he’s not good enough to survive it?
The bottom line is, for better or worse, MMA provides incredible moments in and out of the cage, quite regularly when it’s done right. It would be wise to remember that, even if we largely learned about it not being done that way in 2014.
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