Bellator 162 drew 582,000 viewers on Spike TV Friday night per Sports TV Ratings. It’s a slight decrease of over 15% from Bellator 161.
In the main event, Alexander Shlemenko defeated Kendall Grove in the main event. According to Sports TV Ratings, it drew 259,000 viewers in the adult 18-49 demo.
Payout Perspective:
College Football ruled Friday night with the Oregon-Cal game on ESPN drawing over 1.5 million viewers despite the fact it went into the middle of the night. Prior to that, the South Florida-Temple game drew 1.3 million viewers. While there were some interesting matchups and the first of likely many promos between Tito Ortiz and Chael Sonnen, there was nothing to tune into that you would have regretted missing.
Card wasn’t great, Ryan Couture shouldn’t be on main cards, his dad was great but he’s mid 30’s and loses to any half decent fighter.
Verbally Chael can run circles round Tito but them “looking” at each other was embarrassing, we know you are in completely different rooms, how exactly can they see each other?
Lashley is a decent name for a 4 man HW tournament, throw in Kharitonov, Brendan Shaub & Cheick Kongo and Shlemenko probably wins back the MW title.
They are trying to make the most out of Ryan’s name and it just isn’t working, he is nowhere near the talent level of his father, few fighters are and ever will be. One thing the mma world is losing is that aspect of fighters having been world class competitors and fighters before they came into the mma world….you used to have guys who were NCAA and even Olympic wrestlers, world champion kickboxers, and world champion BJJ artists, etc etc. I see it more with the women these days than the men.
We are in a “cookie cutter” era where guys are literally brought up in mma gyms learning a big of everything on mma teams…usually the BJJ/MT Boxing/Wrestling model.
Having said that, unless I miss my guess, this isn’t much less than the last UFC on FS1 correct?
Names…its all about names.
Wil that’s very true. There is no solid amateur system to weed out the phonies.
There are a number of fighters with world class backgrounds in a discipline, some people just aren’t well informed on the sport.
Fight Fan, there is an amateur system set up for mma but definitely the era of champions from other sports is a bit low right now, however, where it is still evident is on the female side of the sport, seems to be plenty of kickboxing champs and the appeal for Olympic judokas seems to be increasing