Welcome to another edition of Payout Perspective. This time we take a look at the last PPV of this decade with UFC 245 taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada at the T-Mobile Arena.
Usman stops Colby in 5th round
Kamaru Usman broke Colby Covington’s jaw and the challenger wilted in the 5th round under the pressure. The fight went back and forth with each getting hard shots on the other. But, Usman hit more shots in the final round to win the matchup.
Covington ran from the ring after Usman’s hand was raised while Usman soaked up the adoration of the fans. This fight was one of the hardest hitting welterweight contests in some time. Despite both having superior wrestling skills, neither even thought of taking the other to the ground.
Usman may defend his title against Jorge Masvidal or Leon Edwards next while Covington may be out of action for a while with his jaw issue.
Volkanovski dethrones Holloway
Max Holloway’s reign as the king of the Featherweights came to an end when Alexander Volkanovski earned a unanimous decision over Blessed. The former Rugby player used a steady diet of leg kicks to soften up Holloway and dominated most of the five rounds. It was not until the 5th round did Holloway open up with some offense.
Volkanovski and Holloway likely rematch on the home turf of the Australian sometime in 2020.
Nunes wins UD over GDR
It wasn’t the most spectacular of title defenses but Amanda Nunes still got the job done against Germaine de Randamie. Nunes almost got a first-round stoppage over GDR although the challenger was able to hang on to make it to the end of the round. Nunes did tire toward the end of the fight but her wrestling was her greatest attribute on this night. Nunes has no real equal in her division and its hard to see anyone in the 135 pound division catching up with her soon. Perhaps another Valentina Shevchenko fight is down the road. That, or a celebrity matchup with boxer Claressa Shields.
Attendance, gate and bonuses
The event drew 16,811 for a gate of $4,041,119.14 post-event. Per SeatGeek, seats for the event were higher on the secondary market than they were for UFC 244. However, sings showed that tickets demand was declining leading up to this past Saturday.
Bonuses went to Usman-Covington for Fight of the Night and Irene Aldana and Petr Yan for Performance Bonuses.
Promotion of the Event
The event promotion was centered around the bitter feud between Usman and Covington. The spark for Fight Week began when Covington appeared on conservative commentator Candace Owens’ podcast and admitted that his MAGA act was done in order to save himself from being cut.
In addition, Dana White did some one-on-one interviews with Kevin Iole and Brett Okamoto among other top outlets to hype the fight as well as promote the upcoming events in 2020.
The UFC 245 Prelims drew 865,000 viewers on ESPN2. It went up against Top Rank Boxing on ESPN in its second hour (TR’s first hour). Notably, Top Rank had its highest viewership of the year with 1.35M viewers and winning most of the demos in a head-to-head with the UFC.
Payouts
The payouts for the event are here. Note Aldo’s big payday of $400,000. Unfortunately, he dropped a decision. Also, according to Ariel Helwani, Covington did not receive PPV points. But, Usman did.
Sponsors
Modelo, Motel6.com, Roar Sports, Devour, P3, Monster/Circle K, Toyo Tires, Nemiroff, Dave & Busters, The Air Force and Monster Energy had the center of the Octagon .
6 Underground, a Netflix Original movie starring Ryan Reynolds was also advertised during the event.
PokerStars was on the outside skirt of the Octagon as well as the corners of the mat inside. Thorne sponsored the Embedded episodes as well as included in an infomercial of sorts with some reps informing athletes of the benefits of cutting weight using Thorne products. Also, of note on Embedded, was UFC-sponsor jeweler Bixler.
Manscaped.com signage also was present on the outside of the Octagon.
The hashtag Octagon Chip along with Poker Stars was to introduce a new game produced by the company.
Odds and ends
UFC 245 had over 1 million google searches on Saturday.
With three 5 round championship events which went the distance, the event ran overtime past 10pm PT.
The UFC sent out a press release identifying Amanda Nunes as the GOAT. In honor of her accomplishments, they had her do a photo shoot with goats. While I understand the symbolism, there has to be better ways to market the best women’s fighter in UFC history. There have been articles written about Nunes which highlight the inability to market the women’s champion. This brings up a great question as to whether marketing or organic fan appeal is the best way to promote an athlete. We saw this with Demetrious Johnson. There was no connection with the fans and the UFC’s efforts to promote Mighty Mouse did not work.
Covington’s gimmick was discussed at length before, and especially after the fight. He used Donald Trump, Jr.’s book as a prop during a media session of fight week and wore USA-themed clothes during fight week. His running from the cage after the stoppage was reminiscent of Forrest Griffin’s exit after being destroyed by Anderson Silva.
The Geoff Neal-Mike Perry fight started a little early with Neal play punching Perry in the abs at the weigh-ins. On fight day, Neal showed fans his hands of stone in stopping Platnium.
Jessica Eye was back in the win column but also missed weight.
Conclusion
This was one of the biggest events of the year and had some great fights including Usman-Covington which has to be talked about as a Fight of the Year candidate. Although ESPN+ does not disclose PPV buys, one would suspect that this event drew around 350-400K buys.
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