Last night’s UFC on Fox 9 was an interesting experiment for the UFC who seem to be treating their Fox events as cards for non-drawing fighters to be highlighted in an attempt to turn them into drawing fighters. Last night’s bet was on the lower weight classes after the card essentially fell to pieces due to injuries. How did it do? Well, the numbers aren’t great, if that is what you are wondering.
In fact, it was beaten by a replay of NBC’s much-maligned The Sound of Music from last week, which pulled in 3.16 million viewers. UFC on Fox 9 pulled in 2.41 million viewers, or a 1.0 on Fox. The competition wasn’t exactly sports-heavy or that stiff, either, at least not on broadcast television as the competition was a bunch of Christmas specials that pulled in better numbers across the board than UFC on Fox 9 did.
I’m not sure that there is a way to spin this as a positive considering that WWE’s weekly live event, Raw, pulls in around 4 million viewers on cable television while the NFL is pulling in 16 million viewers on Monday night and 8 million on Thursday night.
The positives are that it was an extremely entertaining show and that more viewers got to see a quality UFC card than they would on Fox Sports 2, Fox Sports 1 or on PPV. [source]