The foundation in which the Ultimate Fighting Championship is impressed upon is becoming brittle, much like the fighter’s progressively softening noggins. The juvenile marketing tactics employed by Dana White and his constituents on the board of directors are an insult to the general public’s intelligence and will only prove to be detrimental to MMA’s place in mainstream society.

Connor McGregor is the prime example of the industry’s insolence in its’ garnering of viewership. One doesn’t need a master’s degree to realize that the UFC’s net profit is contingent on the viewer’s motivation to watch the fight, which entails paying a whopping $60 pay per view charge for a bout that may very well only last minutes (even seconds). This is why people generally, including myself, wait until the next day to watch the 5 second knockout gif on Reddit for free.
What the board did in order to combat this phenomenon is to mold Connor into an anti-hero. Earlier this year, Connor took to social media to express his discontent with Dana White and the UFC, despite making millions due to their existence. What this amounted t essentially was a virtual temper tantrum, complaining about the fact that the organization was making far more money off of his fights than he was. He fooled millions, including myself, into thinking it was authentic, and Dana White was adamant that Connors time in the limelight was done, and that he had taken their graciousness for granted, and that Connor would learn the error of his ways.

After a pariah of ambiguous social media posts, facilitated conflicts with Diaz, and press-conferences for no other reason than to make people want to have an opinion, after all of that conflict for the whole world to perceive, the board so graciously allowed Connor to fight, and the whole thing is drawn all the way out, and what were left with is the unsatisfactory, boring victory of an overgrown man-child who’s only purpose is to assault other man-children for smarter ones in suites. Sure the UFC made $60 million for this snooze fest, but Mayweather put me to sleep last year and walked away with $300,000,000; and he didn’t have to have a fake temper tantrum in order to have it happen. All he had to do was be great.

Anti-heroes are popular because there is an infinite amount of perspectives to choose from. Is he the egotistical asshole who is biting the hand that feeds? Is he the underdog with a chip on his shoulder, against all odds, him against the world?

The truth is, neither. And he’s not anything in-between. He’s not even on the gradient. He’s aware of the gradient, and they want you to keep guessing, to keep sharing your worthless opinion. And this is why the UFC isn’t is great as it could be: it isn’t as authentic as it pretends to be. It tricks its audience into buying into the connotation. The odds aren’t insurmountable; the primordial fulfillment we experience while watching these men pummel one another is limited because of these senseless stipulations. Imagine an MMA fight where the winner was to receive $300,000,000. Where they didn’t have to cause a public nuisance just to garner low bearing fruit. Imagine if all it was about was the fight. The two men entering that octagon would enter with the adrenaline needed to to kill ten men.

When it becomes so abundantly clear that they’ll say anything for viewership, you have to question their integrity as a whole. Not that it even matters, as the UFC itself was quietly sold to entertainment empire WME-IMG for $4,000,000,000 after the success of UFC 202. Do you really think it was all an accident that all of those altercations, transgressions, and conflicts occurred, caught your attention, established the success for the event itself, and brokered the deal for the federation itself? Do you think the board of directors or Dana White would find themselves in such an ideal position if their star Connor had lost his rematch to Diaz?

Food for thought.