Fox Hopes to Land UFC Card for Super Bowl 48 Weekend in 2014
The biggest sporting event in the United States is by far the NFL Super Bowl, which goes from city to city and network to network every single year.
In 2014, Super Bowl 48 will be held at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., and be the first to be played outdoors in a cold weather situation.
The interest of the big game to MMA fans, however, is sparked because the Super Bowl will be broadcast on Fox, the television partner of the UFC.
Each year in recent history, the UFC has held a pay-per-view event the same weekend as the Super Bowl, which typically serves as one of its biggest fight cards of the year, but in 2014 there might be a special project in the works in coordination with their TV partners at Fox.
According to Fox Sports President Eric Shanks, the network would love to put on a special UFC event during Super Bowl weekend, which could easily become the biggest network show the promotion has ever put on.
“We would love to. We think that Super Bowl week in New York is going to be unlike anything else. We're going to own the city, we're going to own that week of sports television, and there's nothing better we can think of than a big fight that week,” Shanks commented on Tuesday.
Nothing has been decided at this point and in the past Super Bowl weekend has promised a big pay-per-view delivery for the UFC, but the promise of huge network ratings could be just the present needed to make a special fight card happen that weekend.
Shanks says that they will continue talks with the UFC to see what can be done, but in a perfect world Super Bowl 48 weekend would also feature a major UFC fight card.
“We're talking to Dana (White) and Lorenzo (Feritta) about that, love for it to happen,” said Shanks. “We've got to see if they can put it together.”
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