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Sorting through Elite XC's good and bad

Yahoo Sports

This time last week, it looked like the weekend would provide the answers to the questions about the future of the Elite XC promotion.

But calling the aftermath a whirlwind would be calling a hurricane a minor storm. And like with a nasty storm, it may take some time to fully comprehend the long-term effects.

First, let's look at the good news, and there really is a significant

amount:

  • On a night loaded with major sports competition, an MMA card came out ahead in the ratings in males 18-34 and 18-49. This was on a night with college football games on ABC and ESPN, two major league baseball playoff games including a major market Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Chicago Cubs battle, and a first-time ever airing on television tape of a major UFC pay-per-view event. Even with the advertised main event of Kimbo Slice vs. Ken Shamrock not taking place, it ended up as the third most-watched MMA event ever in North America.

  • Elite XC head of fight operations Jeremy Lappen admitted that CBS financed the show, which shows a new level of commitment from the network after Elite XC itself had lost money on its first two network shows.

Questions about the viability of MMA on network Saturday prime time television were answered. With the right stars, it is viable long-term. Just putting on fights, even good ones, without the right stars, is not.

  • The most heavily anticipated women's MMA match in North America was set up, and likely to take place in early 2009, matching Brazilian Cristiane "Cyborg" Santos and Gina Carano, both of whom scored impressive wins.

Carano, for the second time on CBS, established herself as a huge television ratings draw. Her match with Kelly Kobold, based on the final Nielsen numbers, added 1,022,000 new viewers to the show. In particular, during the course of her match, males 18-34 increased 69 percent. It was the second straight Carano match on CBS to add a million viewers, a figure establishing her as an elite-level draw. The only other MMA match this year to do this was Anderson Silva vs. James Irvin on a UFC show in July.

If Carano was not significantly bonused from her $25,000 per-fight contract, signed in early 2007 before she had any kind of a national name, she is clearly the most underpaid fighter as compared to what she brings to the table.

  • Nobody heard of Seth Petruzelli a week ago. Today, after TKOing Kimbo in 14 seconds, he is one of the sport's most talked about fighters.

  • Elite XC actually did some of its best numbers with men 50-54, an audience UFC doesn't reach. It is clear there is the idea of a significantly measurable core MMA audience that follows the two brands is greatly overplayed. There is a UFC audience that varies largely based on the star power being delivered. There is a very different CBS audience that will watch Slice and Carano, but are not nearly as interested in watching quality fights.

  • Affliction, through multiple television commercials pushing Fedor Emelianenko, and a knockout win by Andrei Arlovski on the show, saw its two stars viewed by more eyeballs than ever before, setting up its next pay-per-view main event, with a date and place not yet announced (believed to be Jan. 24 at the Honda Center in Anaheim) that will almost surely draw more buys than any MMA show outside the UFC in history.

  • Ratings for the minor cards on Showtime are inching up. A Sept. 26 ShoXC broadcast did a 0.74 rating, the largest for the series in its brief history. There is another similar show Friday night, and the company finishes its 2008 calendar with a bigger event on Showtime on Nov. 8 from Reno, Nev., headlined by Robbie Lawler defending his Elite XC middleweight title against Joe Villasenor and Eddie Alvarez facing Nick Diaz for the vacant lightweight title.

Lappen said the company hasn't made any plans past that show and will have to decide how to balance its marquee matches with plans for pay-per-view, plans for quarterly CBS specials and regular Showtime events.

Now for the bad news

Due to the shocking turn of events in the main event, the event got more publicity after the fact than all but a few shows in history.

The bad news is, most of the company publicity wasn't good.

The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulations, which oversees the Florida Boxing Commission and had regulatory power of Saturday's show in Sunrise, Fla., had started a preliminary investigation of the main event. This has the potential to become the first high-profile possible fight manipulation scandal the sport has faced, even though it is hardly the first questionable fight.

The claim is Petruzelli was offered a bonus to not take the fight to the ground, believed to be Slice's weakness. Based on his comments in a radio interview in Orlando on Monday that he has since repudiated, it changed what would have been his strategy in the fight.

Lappen and Petruzelli have since both said Petruzelli was offered a knockout bonus, not a bonus to keep the fight standing. A knockout bonus would be perfectly legal according to Alexis Antonacci, the press secretary for the department. A bonus for not going to the ground would not be.

"While the Department of Business and Professional Regulations doesn't have any reason to believe any wrongdoing occurred in the match, given the interest in the match, we have begun a preliminary investigation,"

Antonacci said.

"He was offered a knockout bonus," Lappen said. "He was not told to keep the fight standing. Kimbo was training for Ken Shamrock, who was expected to take it to the ground, and should be congratulated for agreeing to fight against a completely different style of fighter with a few hours notice. Most promoters would have in the same situation had to cancel the show.

"Other fighters got knockout bonuses. You can knock a guy out fighting on the ground. The bonus was for a KO or a TKO."

Although many contradictory things have been said over the past week, Lappen said that Petruzelli did not have a submission bonus worked into his last-minute deal.

But that type of bonusing, and even UFC's type of bonusing, rewarding the participants in the best fight, can change strategies. It is well known in UFC you are greatly encouraged to put on crowd-pleasing fights. It is often better for a career to lose a great fight than win a boring fight, and that also changes match strategies.

Still, credibility damage has been done to Elite XC, and possibly the sport overall. Major media around the country has talked about the fight, many using the term "fix," to describe it.

A Wrestling Observer Web site poll indicated that 87 percent of approximately 500 respondents believed Petruzelli's original remark that he was encouraged by management not to take the fight to the ground.

While many are writing Slice off as a drawing card after his loss, the jury is still out. After the May 31 show, in which Slice struggled to put away James Thompson, there were comments about how the show did more harm than good to MMA and it exposed Slice as a fraud.

Yet, MMA is more popular, Slice is more well-known than ever and people still wanted to see him fight. Now he's been knocked out.

Slice can probably still draw television ratings if he fought Shamrock, but Lappen seemed cold whenever that idea is brought up. He probably could draw even bigger ratings against Petruzelli in a rematch, but Petruzelli believes Slice has no interest in that match. Plus, there will be a limit to the public's fascination with Slice. But if history is an indication, similar characters like Bob Sapp in Japan and Tank Abbott in the U.S. continued to be major viable drawing headliners after losing a lot more than one fight.