Luke Thomas of MMAFighting.com and I taped another installment of The MMA Tete-A-Tete: Coarsening the Discourse last week. As always you can see the whole collection on Luke’s YouTube playlist. Here’s part 1 of the discussion in which I debut my new Tom Landry model Stetson hat.
Part 2 is after the jump.
Topics discussed include:
- Reviews of the fights and broadcast of UFC on Fuel TV
- Jake Ellenberger’s prospects as a title challenger
- Dana White vs. Floyd Mayweather
- UFC 144 and the UFC’s business prospects in Japan
- Britney Palmer in Playboy
Enjoy!
SBN coverage of UFC 144: Edgar vs. Henderson
As a supplement to our discussion of UFC 144 and the UFC’s prospects in Japan, here’s some commentary from Zach Arnold about the TV deal in Japan for the event:
The TV situation for UFC is not great at all in Japan. This is not their fault, at least not primarily so. With Godfather Ishii still hanging around trying to wine and dine fighters who K-1 owes money to by taking them out to high-end Italian restaurants, we know that the more things change the more they stay the same. Until the bad blood is flushed out of the industry in Japan, don’t expect TV networks to want to invest any sort of major capital into a fight promotion at this point. No TV executive wants to deal with the police breathing down their throat and making them justify why they are giving cash to convicted criminals. TV Tokyo announced that the UFC Japan show will air late Sunday night 3:15 AM JST to 4:45 AM JST. The network even admitted it was a last-minute line-up edition and will be sponsored by Don Quijote & UFC Undisputed 3. In other words, Dentsu couldn’t even manage to get a daytime or golden time pay-for-play deal on the smallest of the Japanese broadcast networks. Plus, the way the UFC Japan card is constructed, it’s not tailored for Japanese TV.
About the author
