by Natasa Shepherd

Created on: March 17, 2010

Over the last two years, the sister company of the Ultimate Fighting Championships has failed to pull in the ratings they're expected to. The WEC, or World Extreme Cage-Fighting has consistently got less than half a million viewers since the WEC 43: Cerrone Vs Henderson. There are two huge factors that have led to the lesser ratings. The first would be the network. Zuffa, the owners of both the UFC and WEC signed a deal with Versus to put the WEC on Versus mainly for one reason to stop rival promotion, International Fight League, from getting their shows aired on the network. Now at first the promotion did really well. The star of the show Urijah Faber really did put butts in seats as you can see from the ratings, any time he was on a card, fight fans were watching. For instance take a look at WEC 34: Faber Vs Pulver. This saw the new star Urijah Faber take on UFC legend Jens Pulver in the main event and over 1.5 million people watched it. The next event, UFC 35: Condit Vs Miura would drop over a million viewers since the last event, scoring just 423,000 viewers.

It was clear that Urijah Faber was the only fighter fans really cared to sit down and watch because he could consistently pull in over a million views every time his name was on the poster. But that also took a hit when Versus was pulled off of the Direct TV network. So now essentially half the viewers were gone and that really showed in the ratings when WEC 46: Varner Vs Henderson which saw a headlining fight with Urijah Faber only pulled in 640,000. This really came to a headway at WEC 47: Bowles Vs Cruz which saw three huge names in the promotion fight. There was Bantamweight champion Brian Bowles, former champion Miguel Torres and UFC legend Jens Pulver. Those are three big names right there and the event only pulled 373,000. This is a huge problem for the promotion. That card is leading into their first ever pay per view event. I mean if people aren't sitting down to watch Versus for semi-free on basic cable who in their right mind is going to pay to watch this?

The second factor is the promotion itself. Zuffa practically took the WEC to harvest the good fighters for themselves at the UFC and send the rest packing. The promotion was initially set up as a lesser UFC, a place to build up younger fighters and give the older fighters somewhere to fight down the stretch but the UFC pretty much tore that apart. Every weight class from Heavyweight to Welterweight was destroyed with the best fighters moving over to the UFC and lighter weight classes were implemented. So the WEC went from a legit promotion to a lighter weight only promotion, one a lot of people really could care less about. There is a lacking of super star fighters in the promotion and they can't go one event without a belt swapping hands for the umpteenth time. Unless the WEC switches networks or finds a way to make people care about the bantamweights, featherweights and lightweights of the world, they are going to be in for some rough sea's ahead.

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