Bellator takes prime-time gamble on MTV2

The tournament-driven Bellator promotion, currently the third largest in the country, is trying to get a real foothold with the mixed martial arts audience with weekly Saturday night fights on MTV2.

The first of two 12-week seasons opened Saturday with a show at the Tachi Palace Hotel in Lemoore, Calif., that featured the first round in the welterweight tournament. Between now and May 21, the show will feature tournaments in the welterweight, lightweight, featherweight and light heavyweight divisions.

"Lyman Good and Chris Lozano was a great fight," said Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney. "The other fights were OK. They weren't bad fights but they didn't light my fire."

Among the athletes in Bellator's stable is former NCAA heavyweight wrestling champion Cole Konrad, who has trained regularly with Brock Lesnar.
(Al Goldis/AP)

The lightweight event begins this Saturday in Shreveport, La., the featherweight first round will be March 19 in Concho, Okla., and the light heavyweight event kicks off March 26 in Tunica, Miss.

The first three tournaments will crown No. 1 contenders for the championship in a promotion that carries the tag line, "Where title shots are earned, not given." Each tournament winner also will earn a combined $100,000 over the next three months. The winners will get their title shots by year's end.

Of note, the light heavyweight tournament will crown Bellator's first champion in that weight class.

Tournament finals will be held on consecutive Saturdays beginning May 7, although which weight class competes on which date depends on the health of the fighters.

Good advanced along with Jay Hieron, Rick Hawn and Brent Weedman in Saturday's tournament with each earning $20,000. The two semifinal winners will receive $30,000 and the eventual purse for the championship match is $50,000.

The move to airing fights in prime time on Saturdays through May 21 has both good and bad points for a promotion trying to solidify itself on the national scene.

The first show did a 0.2 rating and drew 200,000 viewers, numbers that are good for the station on a Saturday night. In the target demo – men ages 18-49 – it was the highest number on MTV2 since October and was up 83 percent from the station's average over the last month.

The number was higher than some weeks and lower than others on the group's previous home, Fox Sports Net, where in theory it ran its fall season live in prime time on Thursdays. The reality was somewhat different, as FSN affiliates regularly preempted the shows for local sports, and it took a concerted effort to find time slots each week for shows to air in different markets.

But Bellator has moved to a station that is not as familiar to sports fans and to a night when fewer people watch television. But it is on the traditional night people are conditioned to watch fights, and the show will be available in about 65 percent of U.S. homes and have the regular time slot it lacked in the past. The downside is that there will be competition nearly every week from either UFC, Strikeforce or boxing.

Because Spike TV, the UFC's home, is part of the MTV family of networks, the show was promoted on Spike leading up to Saturday's debut. In addition, Bellator's featherweight champion, Joe Warren, made a guest appearance on Spike's TNA pro-wrestling show to push the new alliance.

Rebney noted that while the normal time slot is Sunday at 9 p.m. ET, the show will move to 7 p.m. when competing with a UFC show, as will be the case on Marc 19 and 26.

"It's great if you're a fight fan," he said. "If you're getting together to watch a UFC [show] on Saturday night, you get two more hours of fights to watch for free."

But as far as overall exposure, the move to MTV2 (with repeats on MTV Tres in Spanish on Sundays at 8 p.m.) required abandoning its 2 a.m. Sunday time slot on NBC, which generally drew between 400,000 and 750,000 viewers and frequently allowed the promotion a ratings win for that time frame.

However it's questionable what those NBC ratings represented. Strikeforce previously did good numbers in the same slot. Those weekly numbers aren't far off from last Thursday's UFC show on Versus, but there was never any buzz about those NBC shows, which were highlights of previous events. Perhaps those viewers were not so much fight fans as insomniacs who never changed the dial from "Saturday Night Live" an hour earlier.

MTV2 has given the promotion a three-year commitment, although in television no matter what the deal is, one must to perform to survive.

The history of MMA programming in a regular weekly time slot, aside from Spike's "The Ultimate Fighter" reality show, has not sustained an audience or long-lasting appeal.

The International Fight League got a strong Monday prime time slot on MyNetwork TV, opened to 1.2 million viewers, but fell each subsequent week and was off the network by the end of the year. The "Iron Ring," a more feature-oriented show on BET that was built around the idea of major celebrities putting together fight teams, opened to outstanding ratings and strong young demographics, but also steadily fell as the weeks went on. After being touted strongly by the network in its early weeks, it wasn't renewed for a second season. A pro-wrestling show on MTV2 that debuted last summer opened to only slightly lower numbers than Bellator, with 178,000 viewers, but by its fourth week was down to 102,000 viewers and a few weeks later vanished from the schedule.

"I hope we're not like the IFL," Rebney said jokingly.

Another difference, evident on the first show when three fights went the distance, is the show ran several minutes long, which Rebney said the network didn't see as a problem. That's a 180 from FSN where dozens of different stations jockeyed for position with different programming objectives.

The company's most obvious strength is a list of world-class athletes as champions.

Lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez (21-2) is considered not only one of the best at his weight, but also one of the most consistently exciting pound-for-pound fighters in the world. His win last season over Roger Huerta was one of the promotion's highlights, and he has a title defense April 2 at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Conn., vs. previous tournament winner Pat Curran.

Warren (6-1) is a world-class wrestler who isn't afraid to tell you he's going to win a gold medal in the 2012 Olympics. His fights are exciting because he's inexperienced as an MMA fighter, his stand-up is green and he gets nearly caught in submissions on the ground. But he's got an innate toughness that seems to get him out of every jam. Warren will fight April 16 and his rumored opponent is former WEC fighter Marcos Galvao (9-3-1).

Heavyweight champion Cole Konrad (7-0) was the NCAA heavyweight champ in 2006 and 2007 out of the University of Minnesota. He's a regular training partner of Brock Lesnar, and scored wins over Cain Velasquez in both the 2005 and 2006 Div. I tournament. He's also new and is certainly not pretty to watch, but with his size and wrestling skill, he will be a handful for anyone. Konrad will have a non-title fight May 7.

Welterweight champion Ben Askren (7-0) was arguably the best American collegiate wrestler since Cael Sanderson, and won the Hodge Trophy for best overall wrestler in 2005 and '06. He has a non-title fight against Nick Thompson (38-13-1) on April 16. Askren relies purely on his wrestling with some Jiu Jitsu but is not a threat standing at this point. However with a wrestling style that works well in MMA combined with great conditioning, nobody has found an answer in dealing with him yet.

Middleweight champion Hector Lombard (27-2-1, 1 no contest) came out of judo, where he represented Cuba in the 2000 Olympics. He's a physical beast who has great throws but also tremendous knockout power. He's had trouble with stamina, which is a factor in a five-round fight, but he hasn't lost in his last 22 bouts – since '06 vs. Gegard Mousasi. He faces Falaniko Vitale on May 14 in Atlantic City in a non-title fight.