Why is MMA a threat to boxing?

[rjj tszyu]

....you can go back in history and find great boxing cards, hell Manny Pacquiao fought on the Lewis-Tyson undercard.

MMA will have big success early and begin to fade a bit, it won't go away but it's peaked right now IMO and it's going to have to use more gimmicks, expand their stable of fighters, pay their fighters more money....eventually the economy of the sport will end up hurting the product given to the fans....more will be at stake for the fighters, they may be less likely to engage, they'll have more fights in Texas (which means shitty decisions and poorly run shows) and the product is not always going to be perfect.

Boxing can still rely on 1 big match to sell a card right now....maybe the economy of our sport gets gut checked to where we're able to put some big time cards together and maybe Don King dies or retires or something and better matches start getting made.

Boxing won't go away...it's hibernating right now in the divisions north of 168 but it'll come back with a vengence.

I totally agree with you here Lyle. If all of a sudden you Americans had a young 20 year old IN SHAPE HW who had a record of something like 15-0 (15 KO's), was exciting to watch and was well handled and promoted (something like Tyson in the early days) then boxing would fly up the popularity ladder. And then if you add an inevitable Mayweather-Pacquiao fight It would totally sky rocket again. To me these two things are only are matter of time off coming around. Boxing has had numerous quiet patches before but has always recovered. How will MMA react when they have a quiet patch??

At the end of the day if I was a young athletic kid and I had the choice of chasing either MMA and earning $250,000 a fight or Boxing and having the potential of earning $40,000,000 a fight. I know which way I would go.

[Drago]

back to what lyle was saying, i think at thie moment ufc is probably at its best, it will prob be difficult to keep paying the fighters these low pay packets (in comparison to other sports) & when that happens the fight cards will not be as stacked.

the great thing with the ufc @ the moment is that there is only 5 weight catogaries meaning all the fighters cannot just jump to another division to dodge another fighter.

this is the situation @ the moment anyway i am sure that the ufc has plenty of time to fk it all up anyway.

[erics44]

back to what lyle was saying, i think at thie moment ufc is probably at its best, it will prob be difficult to keep paying the fighters these low pay packets (in comparison to other sports) & when that happens the fight cards will not be as stacked.

the great thing with the ufc @ the moment is that there is only 5 weight catogaries meaning all the fighters cannot just jump to another division to dodge another fighter.

this is the situation @ the moment anyway i am sure that the ufc has plenty of time to fk it all up anyway.

boxers jump into other weight classes to avoid other boxers

funny

[killersheep]

In my estimation, MMA specifically UFC shows that a dictatorship is the most viable business model for combat sports in the modern day. The argument that MMA fighters will see a higher pay in boxing and move over to boxing promoters acts on the assumption that boxing can maintain those high of paydays, which I'm not so sure about, at least not in the US.

As to boxing making a return to network TV, I find this highly unlikely as the first step as the universal appeal of boxing is not what it once was and why would a promoter choose to go with a network when they can pocket much more money from the selected viewership of premium cable channels or better yet PPV?

I think a league type setup in boxing would be a good thing, I will probably start another thread with the particulars. It all comes down to, not only are the best fighters in a division not likely to fight each other, but the best fighters in a division are likely to fight only once a year. It's hard to really get behind a fighter you won't see for who knows how long except to talk trash on youtube.

My personal take on MMA: I am not a fan of the ground game, but I can appreciate the athleticism and skill of it, the same way as I look at the ballet, plenty of skill and athleticism just not my cup of tea. I won't go out of my way to watch MMA, but if it's on I'll watch it.