Fan Bias

 Strikeforce makes its CBS debut tonight with a card emanating from the Sears Centre in Illinois at 9 PM ET. The promotion is putting on the best MMA card ever shown on network TV while giving fans credible fights featuring some very recognizable names and fighters who are all near or in the prime of their careers. The event clearly revolves around the mainstream introduction of arguably the top heavyweight of the last decade — Russian Fedor Emelianenko — but also has plenty more to offer.

While the fights themselves are noteworthy, here’s what else I’ll be looking for before I declare Strikeforce’s network debut a success.

The Sears Centre needs to be packed. There’s nothing worse than tuning in to a sporting event and seeing an arena that’s half-empty with disinterested fans. Just ask viewers who’ve tried to watch the upstart professional football league, the UFL. I’m one of them. Clearly, NFL-caliber coaches and players in the UFL haven’t been enough to entice fans to buy tickets.

Similarly, if Strikeforce doesn’t want to come off as UFC lite to casual fans, tonight’s event needs to be sold out or near sold out to at least give it the appearance of being the place to be. Fortunately for the promotion, reports earlier this week indicate that the Sears Centre may very well be close to sold out Saturday night. Of course, those reports were based on anecdotal evidence or figures provided by Strikeforce itself. Ultimately, what we see and hear tonight will be the true indicator and the state athletic commission should have final attendance figures available over the next week or so.

What would be impressive about a Chicago-area sellout for Strikeforce is that the promotion is based in San Jose and has rarely ventured very far East. In the Bay area, Strikeforce has been able to appeal to fans interested in Frank Shamrock, Cung Le, Gilbert Melendez, and Josh Thomson, who are all local products. So, for the promotion to appeal to an entirely different geography is impressive and is something only the UFC has been able to do with any regularity. Most promotions rarely succeed with fight cards that are not built around local talent (although this Strikeforce card does have its fair share of Chicago-area fighters on the dark card.)

Strikeforce needs to highlight blue-chip sponsors. With news this week that Baltimore-based Under Armour has signed UFC welterweight champ Georges St. Pierre as a spokesperson and with the UFC’s recent success with sponsors such as Harley-Davidson, Strikeforce needs to show fans that MMA is not a Zuffa-led one-trick pony but rather that there’s acceptance of the sport as a whole by blue-chip sponsors.

It would be great to see such a sponsor or two on the Strikeforce mat tonight. At the very least, the promotion can crow about the fact that reports indicate that television advertising inventory for the show has already been sold out.

The Modaferri vs. Coenen women’s fight needs to make the telecast.

Modaferri (l) vs. Coenen (r)

Gina Carano has been an overwhelming boon for women’s MMA. She’s proven that women can fight and that those who do can also be attractive and have crossover appeal (see American Gladiators.) On the other hand, she may have also stunted the growth of women’s MMA because of the long shadow she has cast over it as the “face” of the sport.

So far, only one other woman — Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos — has been able to step out from that shadow and she validated her status by soundly defeating Carano earlier this year.

However, there are many other qualified, talented, and attractive women in the sport and not all of them fight in the Gina Carano division (145 pounds.) For now, I’ll settle for women’s fights in that division but in order to prove Dana White wrong and show that women’s MMA has the depth to be a viable option, CBS really needs to find a way to get tonight’s female fight onto its telecast.

Every women’s fight I’ve ever seen live has inevitably captured the imagination and support of the fans in the stands. Viewers need to be shown that women’s MMA is more than just one or two familiar faces.

Fedor needs to win.

Rogers (l) vs. Fedor (r)

I hate to say this but in reality the statement is no different than saying baseball is better when the Yankees are good, football is better when the Dallas Cowboys are good, and college hoops are better when North Carolina is good.

Unlike those other sports, however, Strikeforce has put a lot of energy and effort into promoting its marquee fighter. Unfortunately, despite Fedor’s tremendous accomplishments over the last decade, tonight’s bout against Brett Rogers is essentially his mainstream American debut.

Therefore, as far as casual fans are concerned, victories over Andrei Arlovski, Tim Sylvia, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, and Mirko Cro Cop, and a 30-1 record are all just hearsay because most of these fans never saw those fights. In other words, for those fans, Fedor is beginning his MMA career tonight (Americans are very self-centered that way.)

A Brett Rogers victory would be less meaningful to those fans but also have another deletorious effect — it would undercut Fedor’s true legacy. As it is, UFC sympathizers believe the Russian hasn’t signed with that promotion because he is avoiding their much deeper heavyweight talent pool. A loss to a fighter like Rogers (who is certainly talented and UFC-caliber in his own right but still unproven outside of his victory over Arlovski earlier this year) in what amounts to Fedor’s American debut would cause casual fans to question the hype and also question the talent that Strikeforce has assembled.

Although hardcore fans understand that any MMA fighter can lose on any given day, Strikeforce and CBS have put too much promotional capital in Fedor for that truism to be a positive thing.

Interestingly enough, the opposite was true with Kimbo Slice’s tenure in EliteXC. While hardcore fans never bought into the hype around Slice, he was already a very familiar and imposing figure in the minds of casual fans because of his YouTube exploits as well as his previous (though highly controversial) victory over James Thompson in that EliteXC’s CBS debut. While the Thompson victory and the subsequent Petruzelli loss exposed Slice has an MMA novice (something Slice himself would not argue), I imagine casual fans were more stunned by those events than they would be by a Fedor loss tonight simply because of prior familiarity with Slice.

Bottom line: seeing is believing and the fact is most casual fans have read and heard about but not seen Fedor in action before. And, these same fans could care less that this is his first time fighting in a cage.

The fights need to be free of controversy. Refereeing is a sore subject for American sports fans in general. There just isn’t a lot of trust in refs whether the sport is football, baseball, basketball…or MMA.

But, when you look at the history of controversial decisions — refereeing and judging — in combat sports, the last thing Strikeforce needs tonight is for a referee or judge’s decision to go contrary to what fans see and believe to be the truth. That sort of controvery has the power to completely overshadow any good that might come out of the event.

The unfortunate perception by many fans is that MMA promotions somehow control the decisions that referees make or the scores that judges render. The reality is that unlike other sports, refereeing and judging are handled by neutral third parties — state athletic commissions.

Despite this truth, however, controversial decisions in MMA seem to undercut the legitimacy of the promotions associated with them and lesser promotions have struggled to continue when faced with such problematic judging or ref-ing.

Strikeforce and CBS need to play up the talent on the roster NOT fighting tonight. Strikeforce has steadily built up an impressive (though not necessarily deep) roster of talent including recent acquisitions such as King Mo Lawal, Shinya Aoki, and Marius Zaromskis.

Shinya Aoki

 In fact, the promotion has quite a bit of talent NOT fighting tonight, including Shamrock, Le, Melendez, Thomson, Carano, and “Cyborg” all mentioned previously, as well as Nick Diaz, Scott Smith, Robbie Lawler, Alistair Overeem, and even the likes of former NFL-er Herschel Walker.

So, while Strikeforce certainly delivers with name power on Saturday (see MTV’s Bully Beatdown star Jason “Mayhem” Miller), it would be wise for the promotion to remind fans that there’s more where that came from. If CBS can put together another free show featuring those fighters, then the UFC may have to rethink its strategy of offering cards like UFC 106 — which has an underwhelming main event of Tito Ortiz vs. Forrest Griffin – for a $50 premium.

In conclusion, I think the pieces are in place for Strikeforce to make a very nice live event debut on network TV tonight (don’t forget the promotion’s pre-packaged NBC fare last year.) Network executives and pundits alike will ultimately judge the success of the promotion’s efforts based on ratings but as I’ve outlined above there’s certainly more to the story than just how many viewers tune in. And, by the way, I’m optimistic, that even in the midst of college football, NFL, NBA, and NHL seasons, Strikeforce will pull in Kimbo Slice EliteXC-type of ratings.

In other words, I do believe that America is ready for solid non-UFC fare on network TV.

(Weigh-in photos courtesy of Esther Lin/Strikeforce.)