Fortunes changed for five at UFC on FOX 19

The UFC on FOX card on Saturday saw two of the four main bouts, and a key undercard fight, all fall apart in the week before the show, including a potential anti-doping violation of a fighter, Islam Makhachev, that came in after weigh-ins. In a week where there were four reported potential violations, two on the card, Makhachev and Lyoto Machida, and two others, Frank Mir and Viscardi Andrade, we’re seeing the expanded testing wrecking havoc with company plans. And we’re also seeing a cleaner sport, as the changes in physiques of fighters on virtually every show indicates. Some people will change the way they look by training or eating in a different manner, but that has always been a part of the game. The eyes tell us a different story about changes in the foundation of the sport over the past 10 months. It’s a combination of both off-season testing, and harsher penalties that have made getting caught too much of a career risk. But even with issues with fighters using drugs popping for substances other than steroids or growth hormone,  they are all part of growing pains that will make the sport far more fair to those who have been competing cleanly. Even with the injury to headliner Tony Ferguson, leaving the other headliner, Khabib Nurmagomedov, facing an unknown making his debut, and the elimination of the Lyoto Machida vs. Dan Henderson rematch from a 2013 fight, the show did reasonably well in the ratings. A UFC show on FOX in April without a major marquee main event would be expected to do 2.4 million viewers, and based on the 2.13 million number from the overnights that don’t include the West Coast viewing, the number should be right about that level. That indicates the strength of the brand, since the changes made the show weaker than usual from a name standpoint. Plus, Saturday’s show had competition head-to-head with live boxing on NBC. UFC destroyed Premier Boxing, which only did 1.24 million viewers in the overnights. UFC ratings have never gotten back to the levels they were on Spike TV, but that’s also a different era since they also weren’t running nearly every week. But at a time when a lot of ratings are declining, MMA, whether on FOX, FS 1 or Bellator on Spike, are either holding their own or growing significantly from the levels of the past two years. And if there was going to be a bad number for a show, given how this one changed so much at the end, a weaker number here would have been understandable. Another interesting trend throughout the show were fighters taking their future into their own hands. At the end of fights, one of the routine questions asked the winners is an offshoot of “Who do you want to face next?” The usual answer is exactly what UFC doesn’t want to hear, nor anything that interests the fans, which is the line of, “I’ll leave to do Dana White, Joe Silva, Sean Shelby” or something along to that effect. On Saturday, many of the winners came up with not just answers, but good answers for their careers, suggesting matches that had upside to them and that made sense to make. In the case of main event winner Glover Teixiera, who challenged Anthony “Rumble” Johnson, White said that he hadn’t thought of that fight, but smiled and said that it made a lot of sense to …

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