In every sport with free agency, there are distinct schools of thought regarding its effectiveness. Is it better to pay huge sums of money to someone and risk him losing his edge due to complacency or to build from within through what is often a slow cultivation of talent? There have literally been billions of dollars spent with no definitive answer.
Bellator took the plunge recently with Benson Henderson, signing the former UFC champion to a multi-fight deal and immediately plugging him into a main event championship match with its current welterweight kingpin, Russian Andrey Koreshkov.
As seems to happen in this wild and wacky sport of ours, not much went according to plan. Not for Bellator and certainly not for Henderson. You might say it was the opposite of “Smooth.”
Outsized and overmatched, Henderson lost in a lopsided unanimous decision, with all three judges scoring it a shutout against him.
On the business end, there were struggles too. According to the MMA Report, the show averaged just 618,000 viewers on Spike, significantly below its season average of over 800,000.
Before you go concluding it's a double-whammy, yes, Bellator's free-agency gamble took a blow, but there is a bright side too: The world now understands Koreshkov's legitimacy in a way it didn't just a few weeks ago. Koreshkov brutalized an ex-champ who has wins over Gilbert Melendez, Nate Diaz, Frankie Edgar, Jorge Masvidal and Donald Cerrone, just to name a few.
“The way I look at it, [free-agent signees and homegrown talent] are all on our team,” Strikeforce President Scott Coker told Bleacher Report in the aftermath of the show. “They’re all here to help Bellator build. It’s our job to put on big fights and great fights, and I think you saw the depth of the roster. There were some great fights. It was a fight card we’re proud of. We’ve done the fun fights, and we’ll continue to do the fun fights, but I’d say 90 percent of our fights are fights like this where you’ve got hardcore, real-deal guys going at it.”
While it would be easy to dismiss this encapsulation as promoter spin, Coker has a point in that we must go past immediate reactions to form a true assessment of what happened, and whether it’s good or bad. To fairly examine the night, it must be reframed within the context of the bigger picture.
For one thing, Bellator has come a long way since it first signed away a major free agent—Roger Huerta—from the UFC back in 2008. That splash into free agency was a calculated gamble aimed at drawing attention, but for a number of reasons, the move eventually fizzled. In fact, when Huerta made his second start in Boston as part of a decent card that also featured Eddie Alvarez, only about 700 people showed up to the Wang Theatre in Boston.
The attendance was sparse and, in a way, shocking.
I remember talking to Huerta a year or so later, listening to him acknowledge how taken aback he was by the shift. In months, he’d gone from competing before 10,000-plus screaming fans to fewer than 1,000 dispassionate ones. It’s the kind of jarring surprise that can make you question your own decision-making.
In some ways it was an illustration of the distance Bellator would have to travel just to reach a level where it could be in the MMA conversation alongside the UFC.
When you fast forward to Bellator 153, you can see how far it's come.
All these years later, it’s a different time. Henderson’s signing received plenty of fanfare, and his arrival drew a fair amount of media attention, including from ESPN. His walk down the Mohegan Sun ramp was celebrated and celebratory, and there was a full crowd to trumpet his arrival. Visually, it all looked great.
Contrast that with what was happening a few years before, and you must conclude that Bellator has made many strides in narrowing the gap between it and the UFC, even if it remains wider than it would like it to be. Part of that stems from past free-agency signings changing prevailing notions.
These days, the difference between the two organizations is not necessarily in the audience size, or even so much in the caliber of fighters, as Koreshkov proved by dispatching the former UFC champ.
“In my opinion, Bellator fighters are as good as the UFC fighters,” Koreshkov told Bleacher Report after the bout. “And Bellator champions can beat UFC champions.”
The difference is in the experience.
The fight between Henderson and Koreshkov did not generate the kind of electricity that most major UFC main events do. This is a fairly minor criticism; most fans seemed to enjoy the fight and popped for several of Koreshkov’s power strikes along with Henderson’s gutsy performance.
But it’s also something that separates the UFC from Bellator as an entertainment vehicle.
In the UFC, an event is often a slow build to a rolling explosion of passionate reactions. Watching Bellator, the reaction comes in flickers.
This isn’t something that can be changed in a day. Under Coker, the product has improved. But stories and superstars push the sport forward, and those are not so easy to come by.
Bellator hoped someone like Henderson could help fill that void.
Last Friday, he certainly showed his trademark toughness, but when fans leave a fight with that as the prevailing memory of a performance, it’s a sure sign that athlete suffered through a rough night.
But is it back to the drawing board for Coker and Co.? Not completely. Koreshkov has that terrifyingly stoic disposition that can be strangely magnetic, along with the willingness to speak his mind.
Check, for instance, his comments regarding Ben Askren, the man who provided him his lone loss.
“If we fight again, I kill him,” he said.
“Did you say, ‘I kill him?’” I asked.
“I kill him,” he said. “Really.”
It’s the kind of thing that might normally gain traction in the MMA space but was drowned out by the Conor McGregor soap opera and the return of Jon Jones.
It is the kind of dilemma Bellator often gets faced with. Perpetually chasing down the giant and playing with a slim margin for error.
For the Bellator brass, Friday night wasn’t a best-case scenario, but it also wasn’t a washout. A little at a time, Bellator has gained ground. A little at a time, it's altering perceptions. A lot has changed in eight years. A lot is still changing.
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