The show, which was headlined by the first-ever UFC bantamweight championship bout between Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber, saw Cruz win a unanimous decision to retain his title. The card also featured Chris Leben's quick knockout of Wanderlei Silva and Tito Ortiz's stunning submission of Ryan Bader.
Meltzer:
Very early PPV numbers look to be in the 350,000 to 375,000 range. The number is lower than I would have expected. We won't have what I'd call a definitive number for another week or two, but that's a prelim number. The Countdown show was excellent, as Cruz and Faber should both get A+ ratings for their selling of the fight. Even though the first airing on a Wednesday afternoon did no viewers, it did normal debut-level numbers for the replay since it was right after Impact. The show looks to have been about 15% up from UFC 131 in the U.S., but was down in Canada (since 131 was from Vancouver, it was going to have more of a Canadian following.
I will admit this show did better than I thought initially, when I said I expected an absolute ceiling of 300,000 buys. In my mind, with a real solid Countdown show, I had upped that a bit, but I am still surprised at how the card produced. These are the times where I wish there were studies that could be done to point to exactly why people bought a particular card. Was this one for the title fight? Ortiz? Silva? Because it was a holiday weekend? I'd be very interested in finding out why the people who bought this show did.
