FanHouse Ufc91

Before UFC 91, Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White predicted that the main event of Brock Lesnar vs. Randy Couture would garner 1.2 million pay-per-view buys and set a new record for his organization. A month later, White said, the December 27 UFC 92 show topped the pay-per-view buy rate of UFC 91.

And now White says he expects UFC 94 to exceed the pay-per-view buy rate of both UFC 91 and UFC 92.

The Brock Lesnar-Randy Couture main event at UFC 91 was hyped as the biggest fight in MMA history. According to a report out today, it was also the most lucrative.

Dave Meltzer of f4wonline.com reports that UFC 91 did just a shade over 1 million pay-per-view buys, and that the pay-per-view revenue combined with the take from ticket sales at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas would make for a total of just over $50 million.

Meltzer also reports that Couture made $2.6 million for the fight and Lesnar slightly less than that. Although that's far off what top boxers make (Oscar De La Hoya made well over $20 million for his fight with Manny Pacquiao, who made more than $10 million), it is a sign of the increasing financial strength of MMA and its top fighters.

(via Bloody Elbow)

Although no one really believed that UFC 91 would do the 1.2 million pay-per-view buys that UFC President Dana White predicted, the early indications are that it did well enough to be the second-biggest mixed martial arts pay-per-view show ever.

Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter says (via Michael Rome of Bloody Elbow) that UFC 91, with its huge main event of Brock Lesnar vs. Randy Couture, appears to have done better than any show other than UFC 66, which was the second fight between Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz. According to Meltzer, UFC 91 topped the Ortiz-Ken Shamrock UFC 61 show for second place all time.

Although concrete pay-per-view numbers are hard to come by, Rome reports that UFC 91 seems to have done between 800,000 and 850,000 buys. In this economy, that's very good -- in North America, those pay-per-view numbers are only surpassed by WrestleMania and boxing shows headlined by Oscar De La Hoya.

So while the record set by Liddell and Ortiz is unlikely to fall any time soon, the UFC is in very good shape. The promotion's cards at the end of December and January are both likely to do big numbers, and several big fights are in the works for later in 2009. Even without hitting the 1 million mark, White is sitting pretty.

Kim Couture will fight Lina Kvokov on tonight's Strikeforce: Destruction card, and in this videos he talks both about that and about her husband Randy Couture's loss to Brock Lesnar at UFC 91:

"I thought he did a great job," Kim said of Randy, just minutes after the fight. "He just got clipped. ... Brock has very long arms and he did a good job. ... He just proves that size does matter."

Like every MMA fan I've heard from, I was impressed with the work that the guys from ESPN's MMA Live did in Las Vegas covering UFC 91. Now they're back in Bristol to recap Brock Lesnar beating Randy Couture, Kenny Florian beating Joe Stevenson and more:

The MMA Live guy talk about Lesnar being the champion and what he can expect when he fights either Frank Mir or Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira.

Hours after he lost the heavyweight title to Brock Lesnar at UFC 91, Randy Couture reflected on what had just happened to him and made a surprising admission:

"The thing that surprised me the most, and that I don't think I was prepared for -- and it's always an issue with any fighter -- is figuring out his range. He's got 10 inches of reach on me. I didn't anticipate that. I didn't think about it. I didn't know that tidbit of information, that his reach is what it was."

It's surprising that Couture would say he wasn't prepared for Lesnar's reach because Couture is known as the best game-planner in the MMA business. But apparently in all his preparations, he didn't find a sparring partner who could recreate the reach advantage Lesnar has.

After the jump, see Couture's Sherdog interview hours before the Lesnar fight.

The main event of UFC 91 ended with Brock Lesnar knocking Randy Couture to the canvas, jumping on top of him, and then striking him repeatedly on the ground before the referee stopped the fight.

UFC President Dana White says the fight should have been stopped sooner. White tells the Los Angeles Times:

"The ref [Mario Yamasaki] was going, 'Eh, is [Couture] OK?' Mario was trying to give him time [to recover]. There's a fine line between that and [allowing] too many punches. When I saw Randy go back down, I thought we had crossed that line."

I agree that the stoppage was a little slow, but I think the damage to Couture was really done with that first big punch that knocked him to the ground and the first couple of strikes after Lesnar got on top of him.

And Couture himself said he thinks there's nothing wrong with the number of punches he took before the fight was stopped.

The final installment of the UFC 91 Dana White video blog starts off with Georges St. Pierre and B.J. Penn meeting in the bowels of the MGM Grand:

The UFC got an unprecedented level of mainstream media attention for the Brock Lesnar-Randy Couture heavyweight title fight, and it's in a great position to capitalize on that attention by using it as a springboard to the title fights it has coming up, including Frank Mir-Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Forrest Griffin-Rashad Evans and, biggest of all, Penn-St. Pierre.

Video from MMA Convert.

After Kenny Florian beat Joe Stevenson at UFC 91, he was crowned the No. 1 lightweight contender. But as Florian himself acknowledged on the set of ESPN's MMA Live, that doesn't necessarily mean his next fight will be against lightweight champ B.J. Penn:

Florian said he wants a title shot, but when asked if he might actually fight Sean Sherk next, Florian said, "It's possible. It's possible, and really I'm ready for anybody. I would love to fight Sean Sherk myself."

The bottom line is that despite the UFC's declarations that it now has a lightweight No. 1 contender (Florian) and a welterweight No. 1 contender (Thiago Alves), there's really no way it can promise those two that they'll get title fights soon. We won't know what the future holds for the lightweight and welterweight titles until we see Penn fight welterweight champ Georges St. Pierre on January 31. So the No. 1 contenders will just have to wait.

Hours after losing to Brock Lesnar, Randy Couture appeared at a UFC 91 after party, and in talking to RawVegas.tv, he made clear that Lesnar isn't the best heavyweight in MMA:

Asked if Lesnar is a bigger threat than Fedor Emelianenko, Couture answered, "No, I don't think so. I think Fedor would probably tear Brock up at this point. I think Brock has a ton of potential, obviously. He's getting better each and every time he steps out. But he still has holes in his game."

I think basically everyone who follows MMA would agree with Couture: Lesnar is not ready for Fedor. Still, something else that Couture said bothered me.