Mike Jenkinson's Newsroom

Sunday, June 1, 2008

One more thought on Elite XC's debut last night

Did no one at CBS or Elite XC have a run-time sheet for the event?

It was scheduled for a two hour block. It went 2 hours and 50 minutes. That's a BIG overtime run.

There were, what, five fights on the show?

One was a title fight - so it had the potential to go 25 minutes, plus at least 10 minutes ancillary time for interviews, intros, round breaks, etc. Let's be extra generous and say 40 minutes for the title fight in total.

There were 3 other matches that had the potential to go 15 minutes each. That's another 45 minutes, plus a minimum of 15 minutes of ancillary time.

Already, we're up to ONE HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES OF A TWO HOUR SHOW!

And THEN there's the women's fight: a maximum of 9 minutes, plus minimum 5 minutes ancillary time for ring intros, etc., so that's FOURTEEN MINUTES.

In other words, if every fight went the distance and Elite XC did NO backstage interviews, NO introduction of new fans to MMA, no highlight packages, personality profiles or ANYTHING ELSE, last night's card could have featured ONE HOUR AND FIFTY FOUR MINUTES of fight time with intros and round breaks - NOT COUNTING COMMERCIALS!

I ask again: DID ANYONE AT CBS OR ELITE XC PUT THE CARD TO A RUN-TIME? Or did they DELIBERATELY schedule the show for 2 hours knowing full well it was going to go 3?

Sure, this was the debut of Mixed Martial Arts in network primetime. But in this regard, CBS and Elite XC showed just how not-ready-for-primetime they were.

EDIT, 6:37 p.m.: Mauro Ranallo (one of the announcers on last night's show) just said on Wrestling Observer Live that the show went so long that his DVR cut out before the Kimbo Slice main event. So, yeah, really lousy time management on the part of Elite XC and CBS.

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1 Comments:

  • I got screwed - DVR-ed the fights only to watch them today and find that the recording ended at 11pm as scheduled - right at the end of round 3 of Lawler/Smith. AND there was only 1 minute of fighting in the first 40 minutes of the broadcast. This was a very amateurish production.

    By Anonymous colin watson, At June 1, 2008 5:37 PM  

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