The California State Athletic Commission has released fighter payouts for Strikeforce Challengers 11, held at the Save Mart Center in Fresno, California. Billy Evangelista ($10,000) and Lavar Johnson ($10,000) were the top earners of the event. In total, Strikeforce paid out $52,000 in disclosed payouts.
Payouts
Note: that the money reported below is only the money required to be reported by the commission.
Courtesy of MMAJunkie.com:
Main Event
Bobby Voelker: $9,000 (includes $4,500 win bonus) def. Roger Bowling: $3,500
Main Card:
Lavar Johnson: $10,000 def. Virgil Zwicker: $3,000
Billy Evangelista: $10,000 def. Waachiim Spiritwolf: $2,000
Julia Budd: $3,000 ($1,500 win bonus) def. Shana Olsen: $3,000
John Devine: $4,000 ($2,000 win bonus) def. Brandon Cash: $3,000
Under Card:
David Douglas: $3,000 ($1,500 win bonus) def. Dominic Clark via TKO (punches): $1,500
Gate and Attendance
MMAJunkie reports that Strikeforce Challengers 11 drew 3,656 attendees for an official live gate of $60,885. The numbers were much lower than the Challengers 7 event held in the same venue back in March, where it drew 4,963 attendees for a $109,222 gate.
Ratings
MMAJunkie also reports that Strikeforce Challengers 11 ratings peaked with 260,000 Showtime viewers. Overall, the show averaged 178,000 viewers (0.59 rating) and peaked during the main event between Bobby Voelker and highly touted Strikeforce WW prospect Roger Bowling, which pulled a 0.86 rating. In contrast, the Challenger 10 show averaged 237,000 viewers, peaking at 280,000.
This event was the lowest rated Strikeforce Challengers event this year, but it is of no surprise considering the competition they had surrounding them. They went up against the Rangers vs Yankees MLB Playoff game on that day, not to mention the Bellator 33: Eddie Alvarez vs Roger Huerta event the day before, and last but not least, the huge UFC 121: Lesnar vs Valaszquez card the following day. Not surprisingly, it received little buzz going into the event. The silver lining here is that the show peaked at 260K with no real big names on the cards and had some serious competition from MLB, Bellator, and the UFC, which is a good number for a Challengers card.
yea…good for Strikeforce..i hope they keep getting better ratings! I love me some good MMA!!
In have been a big fan and supporter of SF for ever, but they seem completely adrift right now. They were supposedly fixing the problem with not announcing the fighters on the card until shortly before the event. But here we are and they just finally announced the second fight on the next card. It will be interesting to see if it does as bad as this card. It won’t have the competition but it won’t have the draw of Bowling and Johnston. They are spinning little Couture as a draw in his second pro fight.
Out side of the EA game and rebranding there has been virtually no news out of them. (All of their merchandise in the store is now rebranded.) I can see getting out of the way while all the news/blog sites were filled with “Brocktober”. But it is starting to look like they are writing off the rest of the year and will get back to us some time in 2011. With the big stretch of nothing they just went through, it looks really, really bad.
They spend way to much time on stupid stuff like Lashley, Batista and Fedor and seem to have forgotten they are in the fight business.
They are getting close to the mid point of the Showtime CBS contract, which means they will be coming up to the point of looking at whether both sides should renew or not. Basically sitting still while the UFC continues to gobble up the competition is a death sentence. If CBS isn’t part of the deal there really isn’t much point in sticking with Showtime under the current deal. That is a recipe for micro growth. Even with CBS it hasn’t been that helpful.