The Weekly Wrap: July 25 - July 31

Odds & Ends

• The UFC announced it will broadcast fights on ESPN in the United Kingdom and Ireland starting with UFC 101 on Aug. 8. The deal spans three years and will allow for high-definition UFC programming in Europe. The UFC lost its key European television exposure when Setanta Sports went under last month.

• Dream announced that Dream 12 will be staged Oct. 25 in Osaka, Japan. The timing of the card seems strange because it will come only three weeks after Dream 11, which is expected to feature the finals for featherweight and Super Hulk tournaments, as well as Shinya Aoki vs. Joachim Hansen and Jason "Mayhem" Miller vs. Ronaldo "Jacare" Souza. No fights have been announced for the Oct. 25 show.

• The Nevada State Athletic Commission will take up proposed changes at its Aug. 19 meeting that could lead to the implementation of instant replay in MMA. If voted in, the commission would use replays to determine a winner in fights where a blow of questionable legality leads to a finish. Replays would allow the commission to declare if a given bout should have ended in disqualification.

• The Frank Ferttita-led Station Casinos filed for bankruptcy after it did not reach an agreement with its creditors on a bond payment. The company is $5.7 billion in debt. The move is not going to affect the way Station’s subsidiary companies do business. That presumably includes the UFC. The casino empire provided the seed money to purchase the UFC in 2001. The company has had difficulty paying down its debt since 2007, and the bankruptcy filing is part of a strategy to restructure. The news came during a week in which CNBC aired a second documentary look at the UFC’s business. The special reported that the UFC did five million buys on pay-per-view last year and took in $275 million in revenue, up 37 percent from 2006. The piece, which originally aired in 2007, did not include controversial comments from former UFC owner Bob Meyrowitz, who claimed UFC CEO Lorenzo Ferttita, as a member of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, curtailed regulation of MMA in the state as part of a plan to buy the promotion. Meyrowitz backed off the comment.