UFC making statement with its biggest week

The UFC’s biggest year is going to conclude with its biggest week. The highly anticipated grudge match for the featherweight title between champion Jose Aldo and interim champ Conor McGregor headlines UFC 194 on Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden, but it is only one of a number of what are expected to be sensational matches over the weekend.

For the first time in UFC history, it’s likely the company will have back-to-back shows with more than one million pay-per-view sales. Following on the heels of UFC 193, in which Holly Holm knocked out Ronda Rousey in Australia in a show that drew more than 56,000 people and is looking to be the second-biggest show in company history, UFC 194’s benchmarks are all trending ahead of UFC 193’s.

This is the vision Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White had when they purchased the company in 2001: Turn-away crowds and a general fistic frenzy.

They’ve made steady progress growing the brand, taking a little known sport and building it into a lucrative business with a network television deal.

Still, despite the crossover appeal of Rousey and the growing reputations of fighters like McGregor and ex-light heavyweight champion Jon Jones, the UFC hasn’t hit the mainstream just yet.

If Kobe Bryant or LeBron James walk down Las Vegas Boulevard, virtually everyone would recognize them. The same is not true of any MMA star, including Rousey, and that illustrates that for all its explosive growth, the sport still has a way to go to be on a par with the other major sports.

That all seems to be changing, and this weekend’s three shows and series of compelling fights could be the impetus to get it over the hump.

To fully understand what the long weekend extravaganza might mean for the company and for the sport, we first must understand how the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight failed to give boxing the boost most expected it would.

For more than five years, boxing fans were pleading with Floyd Mayweather to face Manny Pacquiao in a fight that was clearly going to generate astronomical amounts of revenues.

From late 2009, when the idea was first broached, to May 2, 2015, when longtime observers finally watched the men climb into the ring to face each other, Mayweather-Pacquiao was Topic No. 1 in boxing.

Nothing else was close.

But then the fight happened and, well, instead of boosting the sport, it hurt it significantly. The fight was not at all entertaining, the undercard was simply awful and the event seemed like a plain and simple money grab.

Many fans were outraged and dozens of lawsuits were filed in the aftermath, spurred in part by the news that Pacquiao fought with a shoulder injury that would require surgery just a few days later.

Instead of creating new fans and bringing displaced fans back into the fold, Mayweather-Pacquiao instead reminded those who had given up on boxing just what they disliked about it in the first place.

Now, it’s the UFC’s turn for its big week. But things look decidedly different.

The UFC will open with a live streaming show Thursday on its Fight Pass service headlined by Paige VanZant against Rose Namajunas. On Friday, former lightweight champion Frankie Edgar will face Chad Mendes in the main event of The Ultimate Fighter finale, also at the Cosmopolitan.

And on Saturday at the MGM, UFC 194 includes not only Aldo-McGregor and Chris Weidman versus Luke Rockhold for the middleweight title, but fights such as Jacare Souza against Yoel Romero and Max Holloway against Jeremy Stephens.

Many of the company’s biggest stars and best fighters are scheduled, and there seems to be something scheduled to suit every fan’s taste.

This is the kind of week where the casual fan who maybe have heard of the UFC but hasn’t really paid attention will tune in to see what the fuss is about.

The bigger the fan base, the better it is for all concerned. One of the keys for the long-term growth of the sport is for more and better athletes to decide at an early age that they want to pursue MMA as a career.

Sage Northcutt, who was signed to the UFC earlier this year after White saw him fight on a small show while filming a web series, is a high-level athlete talented enough to go into any number of other sports.

But the 19-year-old chose MMA because he’d been in martial arts since he was 5, and he, according to White, is one of the two big potential stars in the UFC fold. VanZant is the other.

“He’s extremely talented and extremely charismatic and he gets it,” White said.

If young athletes think they can make a good living by fighting, more of them will try it. The average salary of a Major League Baseball player in 2015 was $4.25 million, and more than half of the players earned in excess of $1 million.

Only a handful of fighters, led by Rousey, make that kind of money, and that’s not going to change in February just because of three strong cards in December.

A primary reason is that baseball is a $9 billion business, and it generates the revenues to justify those kinds of salaries. Revenues are nowhere near that in MMA, and may never be.

This week, though, the UFC has the chance to create a number of new fans for the sport and help push it toward the inevitable mainstream acceptance.

The fact that White and Fertitta loaded their big week with compelling fights and made it a sort of celebration of mixed martial arts will play a large role in that.

It’s the anti-Mayweather-Pacquiao. And that is very much a good thing.