Aldo vs Faber Recap: Was this a WEC Card?
On Saturday night, the World Extreme Cagefighting MMA promotion made it’s first big venture onto PPV with a huge card, lined from top to bottom with awesome fights. Too bad unless you knew who the WEC was, you wouldn’t have known it was them putting on the card.
If you watched the PPV, which hopefully everyone reading this did, you may have noticed almost no reference to WEC at all on the PPV, unless you count the Title belts. From the commentator microphones showing on “Aldo vs Faber”, to (Mike Goldberg) Goldie, (Joe) Rogan and (Michael) Buffer handling commentating and announcing duties, to only mentions of “the organization”, if fans were tuning in for the first time due to the show being plugged by Zuffa, you might have thought they brought in some lower weight classes. Sadly, this wasn’t the case.
While a promotion should never upstage it’s fighters, giving your sister promotion some much needed advertising would greatly benefit not only the promotion, but it’s fighters. Not everyone knows who a guy like Shane Roller is. Not everyone knows Leonard Garcia. Hopefully, they do after the PPV, but the promotion’s name was gone.
During the free prelims on SPIKE TV, WEC should have been thrown around like it was candy. What better way to get people to notice than at that time. If a random fan were to be switching through channels and notice Goldberg and Joe Rogan, one might have thought they were watching a UFC free broadcast. Except, this wasn’t the UFC, this was WEC.
While the big wigs over at Zuffa have denied any huge merger between the two, speculation has started as to whether or not this might be the beginning of one. Time will only tell if this PPV actually helped Reed Harris and WEC, or did people truly think more of the UFC and it’s people.
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