Fox Executive: No Sport Could Be More Mainstream Than UFC
We’ve been watching mainstream MMA for years. | Photo:
Sherdog.com
On Aug. 18, the UFC announced a seven-year broadcast deal with Fox that UFC President Dana White called the biggest milestone in his company’s history.
Fox Sports Co-President Eric Shanks is also excited about the partnership, which kicks off with a Nov. 12 event in Anaheim, Calif. Shanks joined Jack Encarnacao on the Sherdog Radio Network’s “Rewind” show to discuss how talks between Fox and the UFC began, producing team sports as compared to MMA and more.
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On what got the ball rolling on the deal: “It was one of the things that was brought to my attention by [agent Ari Emanuel] over at William Morris Endeavor soon after I got here [at Fox]. He knew my love affair with the sport and with what these guys have done. It was a great coincidence that the rights were available and that all of the stars aligned here at Fox to be able to make it happen.”
On whether he had to sell the idea to anyone at Fox: “I
think there’s always been -- even before I came back here --
there’s been this kind of undercurrent of great support for the
sport. … Everybody was able to take a step back and really
recognize what UFC has done over the past decade. The advertising
support that they’ve gotten, the ratings on Spike, the fact that
pay-per-view in other sports, other genres has declined while these
guys continue to increase globally their share of the pay-per-view
market ... I think once you really reflect, then that undercurrent
of support and interest in the sport coupled with the opportunity
that was in front of us, everybody just started to rally around it
again. It was not really trying to sell anybody. It was finally
taking the time to kind of reflect and say, ‘OK, now is the
time.’”
On the less-than-stellar ratings MMA pulled on CBS: “I think first of all, MMA on CBS, CBS is probably the wrong demographic to be trying to make MMA work. I think that again, when we made the announcement, I’m sure and we’ve seen it in social media, in all the fan responses, people are wondering why it took so long for Fox and the UFC to get married because it seemed like we should have done it a long time ago. I think there’s a huge difference between what Fox, FX and Fuel bring to the table compared to CBS and Spike.
On the ratings dip “The Ultimate Fighter” has had on Spike TV: “Now you remember ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ was once the number one show in all of cable, and still today it’s a top-30 show and I think it’s even higher than that when you just take a look at men 18-34. As the entertainment landscape has fragmented over the past 10 years, this has continued to be one of the top performers. You can always look back and say, ‘What happened to this? What happened to that?’ I don’t really care. What I care about is when Dana and Lorenzo [Fertitta] came up and started pitching the idea of what they wanted to do to freshen up ‘The Ultimate Fighter,’ that got us more excited than what had happened in the past. … The stuff that we can do is just unbelievable. I think we’re looking forward rather than looking at what has happened over the last few years.”
On lingering misconceptions and the UFC’s potential: “I think it’s amazing as much as this country likes to kind of look toward the future … a lot of people still have in their mind what this sport was over a decade ago. … People still have this memory of the controversy of over a decade ago, but if you look at the past decade, there’s no sport that could be more mainstream than the UFC.”
On production ideas for the UFC (Shanks worked on the virtual first-down line used on football telecasts and the FoxTrax hockey puck once used on NHL telecasts): “I’m not taking credit for the idea for any of those -- just I was part of the team that worked on it. … Nothing’s come to mind yet, but between Dana and Lorenzo and all the great producers we have over here, George Greenberg and everybody, I’m sure that we will be talking about what type of enhancements would make sense for the UFC on Fox.”
On the difference between producing team sports and MMA: “I think that with the team sport, you always have to try to pick out stars on a team. You try and let people connect with a particular story of a star and why should I care about that individual because sports broadcasting is all about telling the story, telling the narrative, help me decide who I think should win and who I think should not win. In a team sport, you have to kind of decide, do you want people to care about the quarterback? Do you want them to care about the linebacker?
“In the UFC, in a man-on-man sport, that’s pretty simple. When you come on the air on November 12, you’re going to be able to tell people, ‘Here’s Fighter A and here’s where he came from and here’s why you should care about him and Fighter B.’ It’s actually great for storytelling because it simplifies things, and you do have that pure kind of global language of man versus man in a ring and only one person can win.”
On whether the UFC on Fox will have a theme song like the NFL’s: “That [NFL] theme song is such an unbelievable theme song. What we’ve done over the past year is we’ve used the NFL on Fox theme really as the Fox Sports theme because we went into an edit bay and we laid the NFL on Fox theme over baseball footage and then over NASCAR footage and we said, ‘You know what? I don’t care what sport it is. That theme gets me pumped up and gets me ready to watch whether it’s baseball, NASCAR or football.’ That theme has now transformed itself into the Fox Sports theme, and that is the theme that you’ll hear on November 12 to introduce UFC on Fox to the world.”
Listen to the full interview (beginning at 37:00).
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