Opinion: TV Deals May Not Be Greener on the Other Side
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company,
Evolve Media.
* * *
Between
“The Ultimate Fighter 25” Finale broadcast and the televised
undercard of UFC
213, the
Ultimate Fighting Championship will broadcast 10 live fights on
Fox Sports 1 this weekend. As far as the UFC's television future is
concerned, however, it's events of the last week far outside the
Octagon that are the most important, revealing and, unfortunately,
perplexing. The UFC's deal with Fox expires at the end of next
year, and the last week in the cable sports sphere was anything but
reassuring regarding the climate the UFC will be inhabiting.
Fox Sports on Monday abruptly announced that its president of national networks, Jamie Horowitz, had been terminated, effective immediately, following the findings of a third-party sexual harassment investigation initiated by parent company 21st Century Fox just a week prior. Horowitz joined Fox Sports in May 2015 after establishing himself as a young producer at ESPN, where he was the progenitor and driving force behind the “Embrace Debate” era, which he lustily brought to Fox Sports properties, spearheading the signings of established, bellowing blowhards like Skip Bayless, Colin Cowherd and Jason Whitlock.
“Until Jamie’s replacement is named, I am stepping in to handle his former responsibilities including programming, marketing and scheduling for FS1 and FS2, as well as digital. All of these functions will now report directly to me,” Shanks' memo read.
While someone will certainly be hired in Horowitz's stead before 2018 is up, this assures that when talks about a new deal between Fox and the UFC begin -- Fox has an exclusive negotiation period beginning later this year -- Shanks will be the alpha at the table for the network. He will be seated across from new UFC co-owner Ari Emanuel, who worked alongside Shanks to broker the initial UFC-Fox deal back in 2011.
With that said, the UFC's new ownership inherited a TV deal worth about $115 million annually; it wants $450 million per year for the new deal -- a number at which Fox execs immediately rolled their eyes when it was floated late last year. You may recall Fox was one of the frontrunners to buy the UFC before WME-IMG's coalition of capital won out when Fox would not up its $3.6 billion offer. The biggest reason for that? The company felt the UFC's evaluation overstated the true worth of its media rights.
What if the UFC does not want to stay with Fox? There's a larger reason I bring up Horowitz's departure: Even if he didn't allegedly do something disgusting and predatory to warrant his dismissal, his actual two-plus years have been destructive. He laid off tons of reporters, feature writers and producers. Then in late 2016, he forced his way into control of Fox Sports' digital division and in less than a year dismantled it entirely. Horowitz's last move before his graceless exit was to axe all writers from FoxSports.com, turning it into a hub to aggregate the day's loudest, blusterous hot takes from its multimillion-dollar talking heads. While Shanks and whomever is installed to replace Horowitz may be able to right the editorial ship, their entire brand is built around dedicating tens of millions of dollars to professional yellers, almost all of whom have next to zero knowledge about or fluency with many of FS1's biggest sports, from MMA and motorsports to international soccer.
Virtually every sports cable outlet is cutting cost, but FS1 is steadily losing ground where ESPN has growth. In March, Neilsen reports stated that ESPN was available in 87,437,000 homes, while FS1 was present in 84,724,000. In May, ESPN actually gained 42,000 TV homes; FS1 lost 80,000. This is largely due to ESPN focusing on online distribution and streaming, with services like DirecTV Now, Playstation Venue and SlingTV; we know ESPN is still experiencing the pains of cord-cutting cable consumers and slashing costs (i.e. jobs) in a major way, but the Worldwide Leader has still found ways to ostensibly grow while FS1 shrinks in its toddlerhood.
It's not about carriage numbers, either. Horowitz turned FS1 into a bastion of uninformed bombast, an unyielding loop of grown men -- you know, since they buried the fantastic and underrated Katie Nolan in a midnight time slot -- shouting, shouting and shouting some more. There are widespread ramifications here, but two are most pertinent: FS1 has trained sports viewers to see the channel as repetitive, stale hot-take bait, while that style of programming does absolutely nothing to actually promote the UFC product. It's not just about FS1 specifically, either, as this is the shoulder programming that is supposed to help bolster, say, a UFC on Fox card.
FS1's current model may be great for producing idiotic Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Conor McGregor discussions, but they can't find a way to discuss an outstanding main event on the channel like Kevin Lee-Michael Chiesa, which featured a press conference dust-up before the fight and ultimately ended in another Mario Yamasaki refereeing catastrophe. These are actual topics made for hot takes and bold proclamations, yet institutionally, FS1's talent and strategy are basically at odds with the channel's actual strengths. FS1 can't figure out how to use any of its talent to actually push its own commodities, and the initial focus on “jocularity,” then hot takery, has poisoned the well with too many viewers who have come to reflexively see the channel as a visual and auditory intellectual cesspool.
Can FS1 salvage that reputation in the post-Horowitz era? Maybe, but it's an enormous tar pit to try to climb out of. The channel has become an object of memetic mockery, even for non-snark journalists. Here are a few examples one of the sports media's hottest running jokes over the last year or so, courtesy of Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch, the king of media-about-the-sports-media:
To the unacquainted, this may seem like a smarmy media member
simply trying to get retweets by mocking an easy, (un)popular
target, but when you realize the general respect in the sports
media sphere and how earnest and unpretentious his reporting is,
you know this isn't sour grapes or standard issue piling on. No,
when a channel makes someone like Bayless the face of its product
and bases its entire operation around the most unnerving,
thoughtless dimensions of his oeuvre, this is what reporting on
the sports media ends up looking like.
The average UFC Fight Night card on FS1 does anywhere between 800,000 to one million viewers on average for the broadcast, with a peak normally just beyond that one-million mark. Since the UFC debuted on FS1 with the Chael Sonnen-Mauricio “Shogun” Rua card in August 2013, any time the UFC has brought out big guns, they've done ratings. Sonnen-Rua did almost 1.8 million average viewers and peaked at 2.27 million. McGregor's January 2015 smashing of Dennis Siver did an otherworldly 3.16 million viewer peak to boost the broadcast to a 2.75 million viewer average. In January 2016, when Dominick Cruz took the UFC bantamweight title from T.J. Dillashaw, it produced nearly a 2.3 million viewer average, despite the five-round title fight headlining a three-hour card that started at 10 p.m. on the East Coast.
All of this to say, when fans are made aware of a fight they want to see, they'll find it on the dial. Yes, this requires the UFC to throw out some big names and title fights on cable from time to time, but that's an investment the company has been willing to make; it's FS1 which has blindly stumbled into some of these ratings by the dumb luck and grace of the UFC's demanding schedule. If a bantamweight title bout between Cruz and Dillashaw can hold well over two million people captive until nearly 1 a.m., imagine what could be possible if that's the sort of content FS1 actually wanted to push, rather than relying on it as a safe ratings anchor to be otherwise ignored.
The grass isn't always greener on the other side, however. ESPN is expected to be the other primary player vying for the UFC's media rights. While the Disney-backed sports giant has lost 10 million subscribers over the last five years and laid off 100 more staffers in past April alone, the UFC is still an attractive asset for the Worldwide Leader: The TV deals for the NBA, NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball are all locked up until 2020, and one of the UFC's bargaining chips is always its ability to draw in fans and subscribers who aren't traditional sports fans. After witnessing how ESPN handled its broadcast of Jeff Horn and Manny Pacquiao last weekend, however, UFC brass must cringe at what its future could look like with a different bedmate in Bristol, Connecticut.
It is enthusing to see Bob Arum and Top Rank Inc. sign a deal to bring marquee boxing to cable TV and help try to make the sport more accessible to a world bored and bemused by Mayweather's tenure atop the sport. On the other hand, Pacquiao had a $10 million guarantee before his cut of the Australian pay-per-view numbers, while Horn had a $1 million guarantee before he took a slice of the gate receipts from a crowd of approximately 55,000 in Brisbane, Australia. This week, ESPN put out a press release, a thinly-veiled celebration note, pumping up the channel's highest-rated boxing broadcast since 1995 and the highest-rated boxing match on cable since 2006.
According to the numbers, an average of 2.81 million watched the broadcast live on TV; with streaming numbers combined, ESPN enthusiastically claimed a 3.1 million viewer average, peaking a 4.4 million in the final hour of the Horn-Pacquiao bout. Just over 3 million live viewers for a Pacquiao fight, a Pacquiao fight that cost Arum around $11 million. People are happy about this?
I know Pacquiao has undeniably faded and many casual viewers were inevitably soured on his current incarnation after his dud of a performance in the Mayweather mega-fight two years ago, but you can't possibly tell me that a 3.1 million average with streaming numbers combined is the ceiling for Pacquiao on basic cable; you just can't. Outside of ESPN floating a few stories about Horn and Pacquiao higher on its site, there was minimal push and coverage for the bout, which played a major backseat to the early, unfolding drama of NBA free agency.
The ESPN broadcast itself? Well, it will live in infamy. Color commentator Teddy Atlas was in full-blown “you put the lime in the coconut” mode, while former Pacquiao rival and analyst Timothy Bradley both mistakenly thought the bout's judges were from Australia, while referring to the country itself as “Argentina.” For the piece de resistance, ESPN let Mayweather zealot and generally crazy person Stephen A. Smith, who screeched incoherently all night about what a bum Horn was, have a debate segment with Bradley to end the night, which resulted in Smith somehow effectively dressing down an accomplished prizefighter while simultaneously showing a complete ineptitude concerning the 10-point must system.
Check out the aforementioned Deitsch's recent piece for SI about the broadcasting tire fire that was ESPN's telecast of Horn-Pacquiao. In it, he speaks to Al Bernstein, who may be one of the classiest media members or broadcasters in any sport. To say that Bernstein is uncharacteristically harsh would be an understatement. Like Deitsch himself with Bayless, truly diligent, thoughtful media folks are done tolerating the sort gleefully uninformed hackery taking over their realm.
There's a slate of other issues that encircle whether ESPN will bid hard for the UFC, from the $450 million per year asking price right down to whether or not parent company Disney will be unsettled or squeamish about owning and pushing a cagefighting promotion. However, if ESPN got within the ball park -- let's say $350 million or so annually -- is the UFC comfortable going with a partner that institutionally seems more equipped but even less interested in promoting anything that isn't football, baseball or basketball?
The ongoing Arum-ESPN tie-up will offer the most telling insights into how ESPN plans on pushing prizefighting, if it sincerely does at all. With its recent boxing outings, ESPN has been largely indifferent: Al Haymon's ill-fated Premier Boxing Champions was essentially given a pay-for-play deal in which the channel did nothing to promote or publicize the events, simply sitting pretty and smiling about saving money on production costs. After moving on from PBC, ESPN has struck a deal with Golden Boy Promotions, whose broadcasts get marooned into unannounced time slots on ESPN2. If ESPN can't figure out how to promote an undefeated fighter like Terence Crawford -- a pound-for-pound king who faces Julius Indongo on Aug. 19 to unify all the 140-pound world titles of significance -- what future does that portend for a great, emerging UFC champion trying to get shine from the Worldwide Leader?
The UFC's next round of TV rights negotiations are still, practically speaking, months away. Right now, it's all about posturing. Still, the UFC can't be too excited as a bride, seeing its primary suitors and future partners pinching pennies, tripping over their own feet and howling hot takes all the way to the floor.
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Fox Sports on Monday abruptly announced that its president of national networks, Jamie Horowitz, had been terminated, effective immediately, following the findings of a third-party sexual harassment investigation initiated by parent company 21st Century Fox just a week prior. Horowitz joined Fox Sports in May 2015 after establishing himself as a young producer at ESPN, where he was the progenitor and driving force behind the “Embrace Debate” era, which he lustily brought to Fox Sports properties, spearheading the signings of established, bellowing blowhards like Skip Bayless, Colin Cowherd and Jason Whitlock.
It is not Horowitz's first unceremonious exit: In May 2014, he
jumped ship from ESPN to NBC's “Today.”
He was gone 10 weeks later. Deborah Turness, former president
of NBC News, said in a staff memo at the time that she and Horowitz
had “come to the conclusion that this is not the right fit.” The
internal memo pertaining to Horowitz's dismissal this time
around was sent by Fox Sports President Eric Shanks, who stated he
would take over all of Horowitz's duties until a replacement was
selected.
“Until Jamie’s replacement is named, I am stepping in to handle his former responsibilities including programming, marketing and scheduling for FS1 and FS2, as well as digital. All of these functions will now report directly to me,” Shanks' memo read.
While someone will certainly be hired in Horowitz's stead before 2018 is up, this assures that when talks about a new deal between Fox and the UFC begin -- Fox has an exclusive negotiation period beginning later this year -- Shanks will be the alpha at the table for the network. He will be seated across from new UFC co-owner Ari Emanuel, who worked alongside Shanks to broker the initial UFC-Fox deal back in 2011.
With that said, the UFC's new ownership inherited a TV deal worth about $115 million annually; it wants $450 million per year for the new deal -- a number at which Fox execs immediately rolled their eyes when it was floated late last year. You may recall Fox was one of the frontrunners to buy the UFC before WME-IMG's coalition of capital won out when Fox would not up its $3.6 billion offer. The biggest reason for that? The company felt the UFC's evaluation overstated the true worth of its media rights.
What if the UFC does not want to stay with Fox? There's a larger reason I bring up Horowitz's departure: Even if he didn't allegedly do something disgusting and predatory to warrant his dismissal, his actual two-plus years have been destructive. He laid off tons of reporters, feature writers and producers. Then in late 2016, he forced his way into control of Fox Sports' digital division and in less than a year dismantled it entirely. Horowitz's last move before his graceless exit was to axe all writers from FoxSports.com, turning it into a hub to aggregate the day's loudest, blusterous hot takes from its multimillion-dollar talking heads. While Shanks and whomever is installed to replace Horowitz may be able to right the editorial ship, their entire brand is built around dedicating tens of millions of dollars to professional yellers, almost all of whom have next to zero knowledge about or fluency with many of FS1's biggest sports, from MMA and motorsports to international soccer.
Virtually every sports cable outlet is cutting cost, but FS1 is steadily losing ground where ESPN has growth. In March, Neilsen reports stated that ESPN was available in 87,437,000 homes, while FS1 was present in 84,724,000. In May, ESPN actually gained 42,000 TV homes; FS1 lost 80,000. This is largely due to ESPN focusing on online distribution and streaming, with services like DirecTV Now, Playstation Venue and SlingTV; we know ESPN is still experiencing the pains of cord-cutting cable consumers and slashing costs (i.e. jobs) in a major way, but the Worldwide Leader has still found ways to ostensibly grow while FS1 shrinks in its toddlerhood.
It's not about carriage numbers, either. Horowitz turned FS1 into a bastion of uninformed bombast, an unyielding loop of grown men -- you know, since they buried the fantastic and underrated Katie Nolan in a midnight time slot -- shouting, shouting and shouting some more. There are widespread ramifications here, but two are most pertinent: FS1 has trained sports viewers to see the channel as repetitive, stale hot-take bait, while that style of programming does absolutely nothing to actually promote the UFC product. It's not just about FS1 specifically, either, as this is the shoulder programming that is supposed to help bolster, say, a UFC on Fox card.
FS1's current model may be great for producing idiotic Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Conor McGregor discussions, but they can't find a way to discuss an outstanding main event on the channel like Kevin Lee-Michael Chiesa, which featured a press conference dust-up before the fight and ultimately ended in another Mario Yamasaki refereeing catastrophe. These are actual topics made for hot takes and bold proclamations, yet institutionally, FS1's talent and strategy are basically at odds with the channel's actual strengths. FS1 can't figure out how to use any of its talent to actually push its own commodities, and the initial focus on “jocularity,” then hot takery, has poisoned the well with too many viewers who have come to reflexively see the channel as a visual and auditory intellectual cesspool.
Can FS1 salvage that reputation in the post-Horowitz era? Maybe, but it's an enormous tar pit to try to climb out of. The channel has become an object of memetic mockery, even for non-snark journalists. Here are a few examples one of the sports media's hottest running jokes over the last year or so, courtesy of Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch, the king of media-about-the-sports-media:
Between Oct. 21 and Oct. 28, the Skip Bayless-led Undisputed lost 45.2% of its audience (168,000 viewers to 92,000 for first run). https://t.co/Kkn1P93icq
— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) November 1, 2016
Last Wednesday the Skip Bayless-led Undisputed drew 90,000 viewers.
— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) November 23, 2016
On same day in same timeslot: Scooby Doo drew 454,000 on Cartoon Net. https://t.co/YYhBAIXIs4
On Dec. 7 the Skip Bayless-led Undisputed drew 99,000 viewers.
— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) December 21, 2016
On same day in same TV window, Team Umizoomi on Nickelodeon drew 835,000. https://t.co/dOnXeZA0ha
On Jan. 12, Undisputed drew 105,000 viewers.
— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) January 16, 2017
On same day/slot, a Columbo rerun on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries drew 319,000. https://t.co/6tGjlaI8FW
The Skip Bayless-led Undisputed is drawing a 0.0 rating in 18 U.S. television markets including Buffalo, Cincinnati and Miami. https://t.co/21fnYvFfj5
— Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) April 15, 2017
The average UFC Fight Night card on FS1 does anywhere between 800,000 to one million viewers on average for the broadcast, with a peak normally just beyond that one-million mark. Since the UFC debuted on FS1 with the Chael Sonnen-Mauricio “Shogun” Rua card in August 2013, any time the UFC has brought out big guns, they've done ratings. Sonnen-Rua did almost 1.8 million average viewers and peaked at 2.27 million. McGregor's January 2015 smashing of Dennis Siver did an otherworldly 3.16 million viewer peak to boost the broadcast to a 2.75 million viewer average. In January 2016, when Dominick Cruz took the UFC bantamweight title from T.J. Dillashaw, it produced nearly a 2.3 million viewer average, despite the five-round title fight headlining a three-hour card that started at 10 p.m. on the East Coast.
All of this to say, when fans are made aware of a fight they want to see, they'll find it on the dial. Yes, this requires the UFC to throw out some big names and title fights on cable from time to time, but that's an investment the company has been willing to make; it's FS1 which has blindly stumbled into some of these ratings by the dumb luck and grace of the UFC's demanding schedule. If a bantamweight title bout between Cruz and Dillashaw can hold well over two million people captive until nearly 1 a.m., imagine what could be possible if that's the sort of content FS1 actually wanted to push, rather than relying on it as a safe ratings anchor to be otherwise ignored.
The grass isn't always greener on the other side, however. ESPN is expected to be the other primary player vying for the UFC's media rights. While the Disney-backed sports giant has lost 10 million subscribers over the last five years and laid off 100 more staffers in past April alone, the UFC is still an attractive asset for the Worldwide Leader: The TV deals for the NBA, NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball are all locked up until 2020, and one of the UFC's bargaining chips is always its ability to draw in fans and subscribers who aren't traditional sports fans. After witnessing how ESPN handled its broadcast of Jeff Horn and Manny Pacquiao last weekend, however, UFC brass must cringe at what its future could look like with a different bedmate in Bristol, Connecticut.
It is enthusing to see Bob Arum and Top Rank Inc. sign a deal to bring marquee boxing to cable TV and help try to make the sport more accessible to a world bored and bemused by Mayweather's tenure atop the sport. On the other hand, Pacquiao had a $10 million guarantee before his cut of the Australian pay-per-view numbers, while Horn had a $1 million guarantee before he took a slice of the gate receipts from a crowd of approximately 55,000 in Brisbane, Australia. This week, ESPN put out a press release, a thinly-veiled celebration note, pumping up the channel's highest-rated boxing broadcast since 1995 and the highest-rated boxing match on cable since 2006.
According to the numbers, an average of 2.81 million watched the broadcast live on TV; with streaming numbers combined, ESPN enthusiastically claimed a 3.1 million viewer average, peaking a 4.4 million in the final hour of the Horn-Pacquiao bout. Just over 3 million live viewers for a Pacquiao fight, a Pacquiao fight that cost Arum around $11 million. People are happy about this?
I know Pacquiao has undeniably faded and many casual viewers were inevitably soured on his current incarnation after his dud of a performance in the Mayweather mega-fight two years ago, but you can't possibly tell me that a 3.1 million average with streaming numbers combined is the ceiling for Pacquiao on basic cable; you just can't. Outside of ESPN floating a few stories about Horn and Pacquiao higher on its site, there was minimal push and coverage for the bout, which played a major backseat to the early, unfolding drama of NBA free agency.
The ESPN broadcast itself? Well, it will live in infamy. Color commentator Teddy Atlas was in full-blown “you put the lime in the coconut” mode, while former Pacquiao rival and analyst Timothy Bradley both mistakenly thought the bout's judges were from Australia, while referring to the country itself as “Argentina.” For the piece de resistance, ESPN let Mayweather zealot and generally crazy person Stephen A. Smith, who screeched incoherently all night about what a bum Horn was, have a debate segment with Bradley to end the night, which resulted in Smith somehow effectively dressing down an accomplished prizefighter while simultaneously showing a complete ineptitude concerning the 10-point must system.
Check out the aforementioned Deitsch's recent piece for SI about the broadcasting tire fire that was ESPN's telecast of Horn-Pacquiao. In it, he speaks to Al Bernstein, who may be one of the classiest media members or broadcasters in any sport. To say that Bernstein is uncharacteristically harsh would be an understatement. Like Deitsch himself with Bayless, truly diligent, thoughtful media folks are done tolerating the sort gleefully uninformed hackery taking over their realm.
There's a slate of other issues that encircle whether ESPN will bid hard for the UFC, from the $450 million per year asking price right down to whether or not parent company Disney will be unsettled or squeamish about owning and pushing a cagefighting promotion. However, if ESPN got within the ball park -- let's say $350 million or so annually -- is the UFC comfortable going with a partner that institutionally seems more equipped but even less interested in promoting anything that isn't football, baseball or basketball?
The ongoing Arum-ESPN tie-up will offer the most telling insights into how ESPN plans on pushing prizefighting, if it sincerely does at all. With its recent boxing outings, ESPN has been largely indifferent: Al Haymon's ill-fated Premier Boxing Champions was essentially given a pay-for-play deal in which the channel did nothing to promote or publicize the events, simply sitting pretty and smiling about saving money on production costs. After moving on from PBC, ESPN has struck a deal with Golden Boy Promotions, whose broadcasts get marooned into unannounced time slots on ESPN2. If ESPN can't figure out how to promote an undefeated fighter like Terence Crawford -- a pound-for-pound king who faces Julius Indongo on Aug. 19 to unify all the 140-pound world titles of significance -- what future does that portend for a great, emerging UFC champion trying to get shine from the Worldwide Leader?
The UFC's next round of TV rights negotiations are still, practically speaking, months away. Right now, it's all about posturing. Still, the UFC can't be too excited as a bride, seeing its primary suitors and future partners pinching pennies, tripping over their own feet and howling hot takes all the way to the floor.
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