Dominick Cruz vs Demetrious Johnson: Free the titles?
Dominick Cruz will defend his bantamweight title against Demetrious Johnson on UFC Live 6 this fall. It will be the 1st time a title fight has been aired on non PPV TV since UFC 75, which was run on tape delay and featured Dan Henderson taking on Rampage Jackson.
There are 2 ways of looking at this. The 1st is viewing this as disrespectful to Cruz and the bantamweights. There is no reason Cruz can’t headline or co-main event another PPV. It’s true that UFC 132 featured Cruz vs Urijah Faber and drew less than 400k PPV buys, and Faber is much better known than Mighty Mouse. However, the last several PPVs haven’t drawn well regardless of who is headlining. The #1 contender match for the heavyweight title between Junior dos Santos and Shane Carwin drew less than 400k. The event prior to that, which was headlined by Rampage vs Matt Hamill, was under 350k.
If fights at the UFC’s established weight classes featuring established fighters get to headline PPVs, then why should Cruz get tossed to a minor event? Cruz and Faber produced a Fight of the Year candidate, and if that isn’t enough to keep Cruz main eventing PPVs, what is? Can Dana White and co. honestly claim that they support the lighter classes when they are being shunted to less prestigious events?
The 2nd way of viewing this is it is free exposure for the bantamweights. By putting the bantamweights on cable, the potential audience is much higher. The lighter weight classes have been producing entertaining fights for a long time, it’s just that not enough people have been watching them. If an event featuring bantamweights gets more people to watch, isn’t this the best long term solution? It may not be what we want now, but if Cruz vs Faber couldn’t bring in that many viewers, Cruz vs Johnson or Brian Bowles isn’t going to draw. You would have to put them on with another title fight. With the UFC’s negotiations with Spike still tense, putting a title fight on Versus is also a way of playing hardball.
On the one hand, you just know that if Brock Lesnar and Frank Mir were fighting for the heavyweight title, there is no way this fight would be put on cable. However, the lighter weight classes do need to be exposed to more viewers. It has been less than a year since the WEC was integrated into the UFC, and while the WEC fighters have produced many quality fights and won a high proportion of event bonuses, this hasn’t necessarily translated into a growing audience. We’ll end with this: at the end of the day, Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar gave the UFC one of its most important moments. If that fight took place on PPV instead of cable, fewer people would have watched. In turn, the multiplier effect would not have been the same. Perhaps the WEC classes need their own Griffin-Bonnar moment.
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