#3 Stacked Undercards
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Now before boxing fans point out the Mayweather-Cotto card, we must note that high level cards in today’s pro-boxing world are extremely rare. Decent boxing undercards such as that of Wladimir Klitschko-Samuel Peters 1, the undercard of Miguel Cotto’s rematch with Antonio Magarito among others are not delivered consistently by boxing.
On the other hand, MMA routinely delivers stacked cards such as UFC 202, UFC 205, Bellator 165 and several others. In the aspect of fight-cards, MMA beats boxing on not one but two fronts-
Multiple high-level fights on the same card: Boxing as a business has been around for longer than MMA, giving us classic fights like the Ali-Frazier trilogy, Tyson-Ruddock fights and many others. However, after the departure of Lennox Lewis from the Heavyweight title picture in 2003 and the subsequent reign of the Klitschko brothers in boxing’s baddest weight-class; the interest of combat sports fans (especially in the US, UK and South America that constitutes the majority of the fight-game market) started to move from boxing to MMA.
This shift of interest of fans also coincided with the mainstream breakthrough that the UFC attained with the popular reality show The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) 1 around 2005. MMA promotions started going all-out in their promotions and consistently delivered stacked fight-cards.
On the other hand, boxing operated on its same outdated model of being top-heavy by relying on the top two or at times just the main-event fight, to bring in the fans. Boxing’s bad habit of being over-reliant on their top stars to sell the entire pay-per-view (PPV) card began backfiring whilst MMA’s popularity gradually increased.
If you look at the under-card of Oscar De La Hoya vs Floyd Mayweather Jr. and then look at cards such as UFC 202 and UFC 205, the differences are obvious. Former boxing stars like Mayweather and current stars such as Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez are highly marketable and can without a doubt sell PPVs, however MMA has its own stars in Conor McGregor, Jon Jones, Nick Diaz and many others that are guaranteed PPV and box-office attractions.
The only difference between the boxing and MMA fight-card models is that boxing delivers good fights with watered-down under-cards, whereas MMA delivers good fights with strong under-cards that provide a boost to the headlining fighters and also ensure more entertainment for the fans.
High level fight-cards every week: Boxing delivers excellent PPVs every few months, whereas MMA does the same every week. At worst it delivers every alternate week. Now mind you, by high-level fight cards I mean top-contenders fighting each other, champions defending their belts, prospects being matched up against steadily increasing levels of competition and so on and so forth.
Now MMA as of late has seen champions like McGregor avoid defending their respective belts and pursuing fights outside their weight classes as well as outside their organization and even outside the sport of MMA. However when you talk about such fighters, they are the exception not the rule.
In case such MMA fighters refuse to take fights against top contenders in their sport, top MMA organizations such as the UFC immediately act upon it and move-on with the sport. The most glaring example of this is the upcoming UFC 209 Interim-LW title fight between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson that has been scheduled owing to McGregor’s refusal to defend his UFC LW title in a timely manner.
On the other hand, when you take a look at boxing and the alphabet organizations’ leniency toward its top-stars you’d come across a whole different story altogether. Take for example boxing’s biggest PPV star in 2017 (assuming that Floyd stays retired), Canelo Alvarez. Alvarez has been criticized throughout his career for fighting out-matched or smaller-sized boxers. He won the Ring and Lineal Middleweight crowns against Miguel Cotto, whom many fans and experts alike consider a natural welterweight.
Canelo beat Liam Smith for the WBO junior Middleweight title (known as the Super Welterweight title in other organizations such as the WBA and WBC), which is another example of him fighting a much smaller fighter than himself. Now it’s not as if Canelo is lacking in challengers at his own weight class, with Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin willing to fight him at Middleweight.
‘GGG’ currently holds the WBA (Super), WBO, IBF and IBO Middleweight titles and has been consistently avoided by Canelo and his promoters ‘Golden boy Promotions’ till date. Canelo is a Middleweight, GGG is a Middleweight but do us boxing fans get that fight? The answer is a resounding ‘No!’
Great match-ups in boxing are left to marinate unnecessarily for years, whereas great match-ups in MMA are brought to the fans multiple times every month.
