The UFC announced late yesterday that the highly anticipated Light Heavyweight title bout between champion Jon Jones and challenger Daniel Cormier scheduled for September 27th has been postponed. The match will now take place at UFC 182 on January 3rd. The match saw the champion Jones favored, but it was the closest line for a Jones title defense in years, as Cormier was getting a lot of respect at the sport books.
The UFC has had a downturn in PPV numbers really affect it in 2014, and it was almost a certainty that they were counting on this UFC 178 PPV to help lift them out of the doldrums. The Jones-Cormier hype train was rolling in full steam, as both men famously rumbled at a press conference and much was made about a heated exchange recorded at the ESPN studios. The UFC 178 card was getting rave reviews as a return to ‘stacked’ cards,
And the show there certainy still has some intriguing fights, including the heated Dustin Poirier vs Conor McGregor bout,t he return of former Bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz as he takes on Takeya Mizugaki, and the main event title defense for Flyweight titlist Demetrious Johnson, who faces Chris Cariaso.
Good matches aside, the postponement of the main event does not bode well for the UFC’s PPV hopes for UFC 178. Johnson, despite being 20-2-1 and a champion that is now heading into his 5th title defense, is murder on PPV numbers where the UFC is concerned. In him, the UFC has a fighter one could argue is the best pound for pound fighter in the world today, but Johnson was the main event for UFC 174 in Vancouver (with Johnson’s hometown of Seattle nearby) and the PPV numbers for that show were in the 90,000-110,000 range, which is definitely not a good number for the UFC.
This gives the UFC a powerful main event for the start of 2015, and no further matches on that card have been developed as of yet, however it will take place in Las Vegas. Jones has a sprained ankle and a tear in his knee, but is expected to recover fully. Look for the hype train on this one to pick up again sometime in early December, after the Dec 6th event headlined by Gilbert Melendez and Anthony Pettis.
