UFC Buys Strikeforce: What It Means for the World's Heavyweight MMA Division

Huge news broke this afternoon as the UFC’s parent company, Zuffa, purchased the world’s second biggest MMA company, Strikeforce.

Dana White confirmed the news with MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani. The biggest MMA story of the year has a lot of implications on the future of mixed martial arts and could have a particularly big impact on the currently very competitive heavyweight division.

Dana White insisted that it will be “business as usual” for Strikeforce and the UFC, adding that the fighters who are currently in Strikeforce will not become “UFC” fighters.

Scott Coker will remain on board and continue to run Strikeforce as if it were its own, separate entity. White made sure to drive home the fact that Coker will be the man in charge of running the shows on Showtime, dealing with co-promoters like M-1 Global, and talent-shares with K-1.

Of course, Zuffa has experience running two promotions at once as they had been doing so with the UFC and WEC since 2006 before merging the two promotions as we moved into 2011.

Although Dana White can be controversial at times, we do have to take him at face value at this point when he asserts that Strikeforce will continue to function as its own organization. There really isn’t any reason to shut down Strikeforce or even slow down their expansion.

But one has to wonder if this deal will affect the long-term outlook for the MMA world, particularly the heavyweight division.

No one questions that the UFC dominates the talent pool at practically every weight class, often ranking eight or more of their fighters within the world’s top 10. But Strikeforce has put together a heavyweight division that actually can make a claim that it truly contends with the UFC’s.

Dana added that free agent fighters will sign contracts with either Strikeforce or the UFC—not both. This leads to the obvious assumption that the top fighters will be pushed toward the UFC while Strikeforce is left to pick from the remaining scraps.

“We need more fighters,” Dana White said when asked why the decision was made to acquire Strikeforce. “We need to put on more fights.”

That comment alone should tell us that Zuffa made this move, at least partially, in an effort to acquire Strikeforce’s heavyweight division. Strikeforce’s heavyweight division is really the only one in which they contended with the UFC, top-to-bottom.

There is talent at other divisions but Dana White and the Fertitta brothers are smart enough businessmen to understand that putting on the “dream fights” within the heavyweight division is what fans have been asking for.

Who doesn’t want to see the heavyweight championship showdown between Alistair Overeem and Cain Velasquez? Or the long-awaited bout between Randy Couture and Fedor Emelianenko? Or a “Goliath versus Goliath” fight featuring Brock Lesnar and Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva?

At the end of the day, this move was made in an effort to make more money. The best way to make more money is to put on the big-name, dream fights that fans will buy pay per views to see.

According to Dana White, we won’t see these fights until the Strikeforce fighters’ contracts are up. If this is true, though, look for the UFC to immediately sign the biggest Strikeforce fighters to new contracts when their existing ones run out. It will be extremely surprising if any of the big-name fighters decide to stick around with Strikeforce.

Like it or not, this is a smart business move for the UFC and it will have major ramifications on the entire sport. It remains to be seen how things will play out, but we have taken a giant step toward seeing some of the heavyweight showdowns we have been begging for.