"The Super Bowl of MMA" is a term you’ve probably heard before.
It’s one that’s been kicking around for years, a tongue-in-cheek proclamation that people cling to when it’s time to talk about the UFC.
As the biggest name in the game, the promotion is the only one that comes close to claiming such a title, offering the biggest stars and the biggest events while hauling in the biggest volumes of cash for their work.
The comparison comes from the Super Bowl itself. The real, literal, actual Super Bowl, the one that’s become the biggest television event on Earth and that floats a degree of commerciality totally unmatched in modern times.
It doesn’t get much bigger.
And not that long ago, the UFC was doing its part to make Super Bowl weekend just a little more special. While The Big Game has long staked its claim to Sunday, Saturday night had become a night for The Super Bowl of MMA to shine.
Huge names. Huge fights. Huge events. Huge money. If you were a fan of MMA and a fan of football there wasn’t a better weekend on the calendar.
Note the tense there, though—were. That’s important, because we’re living in a very different time heading into Super Bowl Weekend 2017.
Saturday night will mark a mostly uninspired, free-TV offering from the UFC that’s a far cry from what the promotion offered over the past decade.
Names like Randy Couture, Vitor Belfort, Chuck Liddell, Anderson Silva and Brock Lesnar all appeared on past Super Saturdays, while mega fights like Georges St-Pierre vs. BJ Penn and Carlos Condit vs. Nick Diaz drew considerable attention in their own right.
Even though there was a decline in star power after a 2013 superfight between Jose Aldo and Frankie Edgar, the events remained relevant and certainly worthy of pay-per-view.
Renan Barao, at the peak of his unbeatability, fought Urijah Faber in Newark, New Jersey, with the Super Bowl happening just down the Turnpike. 2015 gave the world the bewildering, surreal Diaz-Silva middleweight special attraction, one that was later revealed to be fuelled by pot and tainted sexual performance enhancers but was a blast nonetheless.
However, last year, a bizarre series of injuries and pull-outs by planned headliners Cain Velasquez and Fabricio Werdum turned a planned pay-per-view into a show on Fox Sports 1. It drew adequate attention, apparently enough for the promotion to forget its roots in the biggest sports weekend of the year and pivot to a network show once again.
This is not to entirely slag the event happening this weekend, though. As was done with UFC 169, the promotion will show up in the same city as the Super Bowl, which is a stroke of genius, and there are some reasons to be excited about the offering—the beloved Korean Zombie's return, uber prospect Alexa Grasso's first big test and Jessica Andrade's probable coronation as a strawweight title contender chief among them.
Yet as compared to the way things used to be, it’s just not up to snuff.
Super Saturday and the inevitable top-flight UFC event that would happen used to be appointment-viewing. For a good many years, it was more exciting on paper than the uninteresting game/halftime show the NFL was tirelessly pushing for the next night.
No one can make the argument that a Fox Sports 1 show headlined by an action fighter who hasn’t clocked ring time since 2013 tackling a guy in the back half of the top-10 requires anything close to an appointment. It’s perhaps a puzzling decision for WME-IMG, which seems to love selling big names far more than previous UFC ownership did.
Either way the end result is that anyone who remembers how great this weekend once was as an MMA fan has to be underwhelmed by the trajectory it’s been on over the past few years. You can hope it changes back to the way it once was, with superstars fighting for world titles at the highest level of the sport, but no one would blame you for being skeptical.
The Super Bowl of MMA? Not if this weekend is any indication.
Oh well. At least there’s still the Super Bowl of the actual Super Bowl.
Follow me on Twitter @matthewjryder!
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