When the clock struck midnight on the East coast, turning Thursday night into Friday morning, June into July, the NBA owners officially locked out their players.
It was a move that has long been anticipated. When I say long, I mean long; NBA Players Association boss Billy Hunter has been warning players this day was coming for two years. The lockout loomed in the background of one of the most watched NBA seasons in recent memory, and as soon as the Dallas Mavericks hoisted the Larry O’Brien Trophy, it became the big pink elephant in the room that could no longer be ignored.
The NFL is currently in a similar, but altogether different situation.
The owners and players endure an embargo on the gridiron as well, with the standard points of contention keeping things at a standstill. While they seem to be much closer to coming to a resolution in the National Football League than they do in The Association, the UFC should be keeping an eye on Sundays starting in September as well.
If the NFL and their athletes aren’t able to come to an agreement before the season is supposed to begin, the UFC could capitalize by moving their Saturday night pay-per-views into the abandoned Sunday afternoon time slot reserved in households across America for NFL Football. Fans missing the violent collisions between a crossing receiver and a safety trying to separate man from ball could certainly be enticed into watching the action from inside the Octagon.
Though the sports are very different in totality, stripped down to their cores, fighting and football are both just a battle of wills. Unlike the NFL, fighters play both offense and defense, you don’t have to worry about the whether changing your favorite fighter’s fortunes, and gritty, defensive struggles only last a maximum of 25 minutes.
While the UFC wouldn’t convert the entire NFL fan population, some of those passionate supporters would surely need something to fill the void. If they don’t have to plunk down all kinds of cash for NFL Sunday Ticket, spending $50 to get see if a UFC event could give them the on-screen adrenaline rush they’re missing would definitely be a possibility for some.
That being said, few believe the NFL season will be scuttled. Both sides are willing attendees at negotiations, and with positive reviews from recent sessions, most people envision the NFL returning to work sometime later this summer. But don’t expect to see the NBA any time soon.
Their situation isn’t just owners versus players, though that is certainly one of the major fronts in this war of attrition. While the owners definitely want the players to accept a series of changes that reduce their income potential and what’s in their bank accounts now, they also have some in-house issues that need to be sorted out.
All of this should have the Dana White doing his best Mr. Burns, tapping his fingers together and elongating the word “excellent” with an up-to-no-good look on his face. This is the kind of potential opening the UFC has been waiting for, and they should make every effort to exploit the NBA’s absence.
Sports fans are seriously loyal, but only up to a certain point. That point is usually when billionaire owners start quibbling with multi-millionaire players and each other about astronomical amounts of money. We saw it in Major League Baseball in the early 1990s and again in the NBA during the ’99 lockout.
Fans can’t identify with the financial woes of NBA players and franchises, since they’re dealing in dollar amounts most will never come close to seeing. In today’s economic climate, it’s hard to feel bad for the guys living in mansions with three cars in the drive and a summer house somewhere foreign or tropical or both.
D’you know who doesn’t make millions of dollars or have a vacation house in St. Martins?
With the NBA showing just how different they are from the average fan, this is a perfect time for the UFC to put the normalcy of their athletes on display. I mean, you have to be a little south of normal to eat punches for a living, but in the grand scheme of things, mixed martial arts athletes are much more like you and me than they are Dirk, Kobe and LeBron.
Some fighters competing on the preliminary portion of UFC events make less to show up and throw down than “King James” made per minute last year. Chris Cariaso took home $4,000 for squaring off with Michael McDonald at UFC 130; James made $4,734/minute during the 2010-11 NBA season.
While even the middle of the pack athletes in most professional sports take home three, four or five million dollars a season, some of the best in MMA make one-tenth of that amount. UFC lightweight champ Frankie Edgar is considered one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the business, and he earned $102,000 for his thrilling five-round championship classic against Gray Maynard at UFC 125. Even if he fought and won four times a year, Edgar would bring in just over $400,000/year.
That kind of money would be great to you, me and Bobby McGee, but it pales in comparison to championship athletes in every other sport. Hell, it pales in comparison to the earnings of Darko Milicic. The Serbian draft bust earned over $4 million dollars last year for averaging 8.8 points, 5.2 rebounds, and 2 blocks for the Timberwolves last season. He’s made more than $42 million dollars over his underwhelming eight-year career.
In addition to showcasing the financial disparities between UFC athletes and their NBA counterparts, this is a chance to show the rest of the sporting world and the NBA-less audience that the perceptions about these athletes are very much incorrect. While there are some egomaniacs and prima donnas in the sport, the bulk of the population consists of the kind of high-character athletes fans have craved as role models for a number of years.
They’re hard working, respectful, and self-disciplined, well-spoken, honorable, and easily accessible. What they do for a living turns people away, but if they watched what happens before and after the fight, fans would see a very different side of this sport and our athletes.
Those are the behind the scenes, everyday reasons to be excited about this opportunity. On a more basic level, this can really come down to supply and demand as well.
The void left by the NBA lockout needs to be filled. Unlike the NFL which is entrenched on Sunday but mostly a one-day-a-week event, the NBA was an every-night-of-the-week option for a lot of fans, and the networks that broadcast games. Both those groups are going to be searching for replacements, and the UFC should make themselves as available as possible.
ABC and ESPN might not come running, begging for the UFC to fill the void left by what many believe will be a vacated NBA season, but that doesn’t mean the sport’s premier organization can be an interesting option for sports fans looking for something to watch in the NBA’s stead.
Fans are going to want something to fill the void. With the dearth of interesting options on network television these days, UFC programming could pick up some of the slack for sports fans who don’t want to play catch-up with Dexter Morgan or get forced into watching The Bachelor/Bachelorette, Sister Wives or So You Think You Can Dance.
Without an NBA season, a re-energized Ultimate Fighter could capture additional viewers, especially with Jason “Mayhem” Miller in the fold. The Bully Beatdown star is a proven hit with audiences, which makes this season of TUF a potential turn-around opportunity in the wake of last season’s sluggish ratings.
The plethora of programming options that currently run on Spike can also be updated, reinvigorated and rolled out to a new audience missing one of their sporting staples. No longer needed as counter-programming content against Strikeforce, the UFC could easily re-air one previous pay-per-view event per month, giving new fans a chance to check out the sport without spending additional money.
With the NBA on an indefinite hiatus this fall, there is an opportunity for the UFC to gain some traction with new fans and continue inching closer and closer into the mainstream. It should be interesting to see how all this plays out in the coming months.
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