WEC 47 Ratings: No Urijah, Lower Ratings

(Even the cast of Dollhouse is confused how this is still on the air)

WKR had a blast attending WEC 47 and the card fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the bantamweight division. Unfortuantely, outside of the true believers, few people tuned in to watch the fight card.

MMA Junkie reports that WEC 47 drew an audience of 373,000 viewers.

That's somewhat concerning as WEC 47 featured a title fight, Miguel Torres and Jens Pulver (two fighters considered to be bright stars in the WEC). Yet, the Ohio card was only able to outdraw WEC 45, which was headlined by Donald Cerrone and Ed Ratcliff.

Average Viewers
- WEC 47 - 373,000
- WEC 46 - 640,000
- WEC 45 -330,000
- WEC 44 - 414,000
- WEC 43 - 419,000
- WEC 42 - 670,000 DirecTV pulled Versus from their feed after this card

WEC 47's weak performance will reinforce several beliefs about the organization and MMA at large. First, that outside of Urijah Faber, only the die-hards care and, as Zach Arnold points out, Strikeforce is drawing a comparable if not better ratings on Showtime, a premium pay channel.

Note: If we consider the "die-hards" as the core MMA fanbase I wonder how many of us there really are? A million? Half a million?

Second, WEC 47 was filled with the promotion's top bantamweight fighters and a title fight. Yet a comparable audience to the last bantamweight title defense at WEC 42 failed to materialize. That would lead cynics to state that little interest exists for the lighter weight fighters. Perhaps the WEC will be a little more gun shy about adding that rumored flyweight (125lbs.) division.

Also the drop off viewers calls into question Torres' and Pulver's drawing power. 

It should be noted that ratings have slipped since the DirecTV-Comcast dispute began but a deal was reportedly reached that will find Versus back on the satellite provider sometime this week.

Finally, Zach Arnold takes his analysis a step further pointing out that Comcast has had trouble branding Versus as a "must have" sports network. Despite adding the NHL, some college football and basketball the network is seen as niche commodity with specialized programming (hence the dispute with DirecTV). While Arnold doesn't believe the UFC will draw well in their Versus debut later this month, WKR looks at that debut as an interesting metric to the true brand power of the UFC when compared to the WEC. As well as the star power of mid-level UFC fighters when compared to WEC title fights. Though that comparison won't be 100% accurate  if the DirecTV-Comcast compromise ends up occurring.

SBN coverage of WEC 47: Bowles vs. Cruz