Dana White Responds To ‘Terrible’ FS1 Ratings/Historic Low TUF Scores

The ratings are in from Wednesday night’s UFC-a-thon; a night that showcased a UFC Fight Night event from Belo, Brazil, along with the premiere of the highly anticipated TUF: Tate vs. Rousey series.

According to the UG’s ‘MMALogic,’ the UFC Fight Night prelims pulled 270k viewers, 539k viewers for the main card, and TUF:18 grabbed 762k viewers.

In comparison, Bellator’s most recent card (Bellator 97) pulled 676k, and also aired on a Wednesday night.

UFC president Dana White responded to the reported numbers in a thread on the UG:

Disastrous? MMALogic is pretty good but he’s way off on this one. We were #1 on all of cable with M18-34 and M18-49. We also beat out the US Open and the Detroit vs. Red Sox MLB game. This is all part of the building process. We’ve made a commitment to work with FOX to build this network. If you look at all the other networks we’ve ever been on, we consistently pull strong ratings.

The first time we put our prelims on FX, we pulled 880K viewers and it grew, depending on the fight, up to 1.9 million viewers for UFC 156. Also, the TUF season with Carwin and Big Country averged 822K viewers, then Jones vs. Sonnen averaged 1.3 million viewers.

We currently hold the top 4 most watched telecasts on FS1 since the network launched. To be honest, our Prelim and Fight Night numbers weren’t bad considering we started on the west coast at 2pm in the afternoon on a Wednesday. The most important thing is last nights fights were awesome and this season of TUF is great.

Yes, we didn’t pull 1 million+ but we will. But, we also fucked up last night by not starting the main event later so that we could get a live lead into TUF. The bottom line is FOX couldn’t be happier with the UFC and the ratings we’re pulling and we couldn’t be happier with the way we have been treated by the network.

Yes fuckers my secretary typed this not me. 🙂