UFC Editorial: Fight Quality Trumps Card Placement

Good fights are still good fights even if they're on the prelims, especially now that every fight is being broadcast

“I can’t believe this fight isn’t on the main card!”

Just about every week, there is at least one bout per UFC event that elicits that response from fans or media perplexed by a bout they deem significant being stationed on the preliminary card portion of the impending fight card.

At UFC 272, it was the strawweight scrap between Marina Rodriguez and Yan Xiaonan, relegated to the prelims in favour of Serghei Spivac and Greg Hardy earning main card real estate. Last weekend in London, Paul Craig and Nikita Krylov not landing on the main card was inexplicable to some.

This week in Columbus, there is sure to be a fight or two that pull those 10 words out of people ahead of Saturday’s event, with the two flyweight prelims — Jennifer Maia vs. Manon Fiorot (pictured above) and Matheus Nicolau vs. David Dvorak — the likeliest choices, and understandably so. Each are pairings between ranked competitors in divisions where it wouldn’t take much more than another win, maybe two, for Saturday’s victors to be in title contention.

But the fact that those fights took place or are taking place on the prelims doesn’t diminish the quality of those contests, and so why does it really matter where those fights are stationed?

Important, meaningful, quality fights are still all of those things whether they’re opening the show, kicking of the main card or positioned anywhere in between, and allowing card placement to dictate how you view a fight or think about a matchup feels strange to me.

Before we go any further, a few important acknowledgements:

• Main & Co-Main Events Matter: the final two places on a fight card carry weight and should be reserved for the absolute best, most meaningful bouts on the card

• Perception is Reality: a lot of people see the main card as being the home of the best fights and just can’t shake out of that approach

• Talk Often Focuses on the Main Card: the majority of our attention goes to main card fights, which reinforces the above perception that they’re the most important contests

• Change is Hard: breaking out of habits and shifting the way you think about something is difficult and takes time, and some people don’t like it

For me — and as always, I acknowledge that I’m usually an outlier and part of the minority when it comes to this stuff — those last three points are both the main reasons why this pattern continues and the pieces we need to really work on in order to shift the way we view these cards and these athletes going forward.

Here’s the thing: the whole “I can’t believe this fight isn’t on the main card!” complaint made a lot more sense in the days when only the main card was broadcast and events happened once or twice a month.

During that time, the UFC needed to really highlight the competitors that were climbing the ranks and working into title contention, and so making sure they fought on the main card was critical because they needed to be showcased. The Internet wasn’t what it is today, access to fight libraries and information wasn’t nearly as easy or plentiful, and there weren’t dozens of experts spending numerous hours each day speaking about upcoming events in multiple formats, on a plethora of platforms.

You needed to see every bout between ascending contenders on the main card because you needed to build familiarity with those athletes so that when they reach title contention, you weren’t rolling out some guy no one had any exposure to in the past because he had been buried on the prelims.

But that’s not the case any more.

The last event featuring preliminary card bouts that were not available to watch in some capacity — be it on streaming or television — was on March 26, 2011. That night in Seattle — which just so happens to be the first event I covered live — three preliminary card bouts went unaired. The next five bouts were streamable on Facebook, and the main card aired on Spike TV.

From that point forward, only one fight — a middleweight contest between Chris Camozzi and Dustin Jacoby on January 28, 2012 — has gone unaired in some way, shape, or form.

We have had a decade of access to every single fight on every single card, and in the majority of cases over the last several years, some, if not all of the prelims have frequently aired on the same platform as the main cards — FS1, ESPN+, Fight Pass in some instances — so there hasn’t even been a need to change channels or seek out some alternative platform in order to access all the fights.

Now, pay-per-views are still a three-platform viewing experience for folks like me up here in Canada, with the early prelims airing on Fight Pass, the televised prelims airing on TSN, and the main card running on pay-per-view, but even then, there are ways around not having access to all of those platforms (not that I’m advocating for such efforts) and Twitter is alight every Saturday with highlights and commentary that gives you a mostly complete picture of what’s transpiring inside the Octagon.

So it can’t be about needing access to emerging talents because we’re a decade deep into being able to see every fight if you want to see every fight. So what is it?

I understand that “perception is reality” and there are a lot of people that view the main card as being the landing place for the most important fights each weekend, but we, the people that cover this sport and spend our days discussing these athletes and events, know that not to be true. Many of the more ardent fans do as well, which is why I get at least one “I can’t believe this fight isn’t on the main card” comment in my mentions just about every week from people like my guy Travis in Langley or Johnny Broderick from Vancouver.

So if we know this to be true, and ardent fans know this to be true, why aren’t we shouting this from the rooftops throughout the week leading up to these events?

Rather than just saying, “I can’t believe Greg Hardy is getting another main card assignment,” why are we all not collectively pivoting to highlighting the two, three, four, whatever many critical, compelling, intriguing matchups taking place on the prelims every week in order to make sure that those who aren’t as plugged in or don’t follow the sport as voraciously as we do know there are important, impactful, entertaining scraps taking place prior to the main card every single weekend?

Why are we so beholden to the main card combatants while often treating the preliminary card participants like a collection of random fighters that we just hustle through whenever we’re talking about these fight cards?

I think the answer is because giving those athletes and matchups the time they rightfully merit takes effort and it takes away from time spent focusing on names and stories that generate traffic and impressions.

It’s hard to pay attention to everyone, to familiarize yourself with each fighter on the card, and the ROI when it comes to talking about a lesser-known fighter stationed on the prelims or a fun low-key matchup taking place off the main card isn’t as great as devoting that time or those column inches to a more established name that requires less supplemental effort.

But failing to do that now is how Kevin Holland or Deiveson Figueiredo can “come out of nowhere” to be breakthrough talents a couple years ago, even though they’d each made multiple trips into the Octagon before their respective 2020 campaigns.

Skimming over the prelims and not advocating for everyone to pay attention to specific matchups or fighters that we know are talented or climbing the ranks is how we get to a place where Jack Shore is 5-0 in the UFC, 16-0 as a professional, 28-0 if you include his amateur career, and yet is still someone people aren’t paying attention to in the bantamweight division.

You can shout all you like about the UFC needing to do a better job of promoting these athletes and that they should elevate them to the main card over non-entities like Hardy and you’re not wrong, but this can’t just be laid entirely at the feet of the promotion.

Whether these athletes are on the main card or getting a big push from the promotion doesn’t change that they’re talented fighters we should be talking about and telling people about on the regular. Everyone can tune in to every single fight if they so choose and hearing the most respected voices in the sport talk about a really promising fighter competing on the prelims is probably going to get a least some folks to tune in and watch them compete, which is kind of the goal, right?

Everyone wants to moan when athletes ascend into contention but aren’t big enough stars, and while the vast majority of the responsibility for that falls on the promotion, how often did we talk about them as stars and treat them as important figures along the way?

How often are we giving these athletes without big personalities or social media profiles the opportunity to tell us more about themselves and show us who they are outside of the Octagon?

Why do we only gravitate to the people that seek out the camera at every turn or post wildness on the Internet, rather than identifying the best fighters and the best stories and giving those individuals equal opportunity to connect with the audience at large?

If the argument is that people aren’t interested in those athletes and therefore won’t tune in for those segments or read those stories, fine, but then we can’t turn around and complain when those athletes ascend the ranks as unknowns, especially if we’re not putting much effort into giving fans a reason to be more interested.

Doing so just feels like such a cop-out to me because if we know they’re quality, we know they’ve got good stories, we know they’re going somewhere, isn't it incumbent on us to share that information with the masses that constantly look to us for exactly this type of information and these kinds of insights?

Isn’t that the job? Isn’t that why we’re the experts?

Failing to do so just because a fighter or fight is stationed on the prelims seems just as lazy and dismissive to me, especially now, when everyone has access to all of these fights.

A great fight is a great fight and a talented fighter is a talented fighter, so why does it matter where either one falls on the lineup?

It doesn’t carry less divisional significance because it’s on the prelims.

The fight isn’t going to suffer in quality because it’s not on the main card.

Would I love to see the absolute best fights and key contenders on the main card each week? Absolutely, but that’s not how any of this has worked for a very long time, so I can either lament it and do nothing more, or I can devote time and energy and space to speaking about those athletes and those fights, which is clearly what I’ve chosen to do.

The fact that there are terrific fights and intriguing, emerging talents on the prelims every week doesn’t make me think any less of them.

The quality of the fights and talents of the fighters are far more important than where they land on the card.

If you think otherwise, it might be time to adjust your thinking.