Ronda Rousey has talked a lot about being the next Dana White, and now she’s laying out what her philosophy would be for booking events.
Rousey is set to face Gina Carano on MVP’s first MMA card. Up until recently, the promotion was mainly a vehicle for Jake Paul fights, but now they’re branching out. They’ve gone big on women’s boxing and now Rousey wants to be the face of their MMA events.
Rousey talked about how she’d run things in a new interview with All the Smoke Fight, and it involves moving
away from title oriented matchmaking.
“The point should be great fights,” Rousey said “Who really cares about a title? I would love to do through MVP, if we continued to do this, is make every single person at home a matchmaker. What fight do you want to see next? Who do you think would match up great? Put on great fights for the sake of great fights.”
This is in direct contrast to the UFC, which focuses heavily on title fights at the top of their cards, with a lot less attention to the undercard these days.
“Titles and belts are almost constricting or they force fights that aren’t really great matchups,” she said. “It should be about the fight itself. The future of the sport is not titles or brands. It’s these showcase fights. When you see people that are characters that stand out, that know how to captivate people, that’s something that needs to be nourished.”
It would be smart positioning for MVP, considering there’s barely a belt left in MMA that can hold a candle to the UFC belt. The North American public simply wouldn’t care about a hypothetical MVP MMA belt. But there is room for a promotion that lines up matches between fighters with star power.
Will Rousey do this? Will MVP even continue to throw MMA events if Netflix isn’t splashing them with cash for a fight like Ronda vs. Gina? Would the former UFC bantamweight champion have the fire to stick around and play the role of Dana White once she, as she’s said repeatedly in the lead-up to this fight, focuses on her family and having more children? Or is this just talk to gain more attention for a fight that has had a hard time standing on its own merits?
A lot of questions and few answers, but the possibility of another organization pushing to put together big fights is always welcome.
