Professional Fighters League? Yeah, Good Luck with That

What the hell is a Professional Fighters League? Who came up with that idea? And that name? That sounds ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as a World Series of Fighting.

Seriously, the first time I heard about WSOF, I was picturing skilled combatants throwing hands and choking each other out on a pitcher’s mound, where the winner would be determined by whoever could crawl to first base the quickest. Popcorn would be sold between rounds.

Thankfully, I learned that wasn’t the case. WSOF wasn’t going to do shows on baseball fields. They were just going to hold them in rec centers while JV girl’s volleyball was practicing on the other end of the floor.

WSOF entered the MMA game with quite a bit of hype and promise. I mean, we knew they would never come close to competing with the UFC but the promotion had a very solid first year in terms of putting on quality fights with fighters worth tuning in to see.

The first WSOF event in November 2012 gave a good forecast of the potential that could have lied ahead for the the promotion, featuring a card that took established UFC names (Andrei Arlovski, Anthony “Rumble” Johnson) and known commodities looking to rejuvenate their careers (Miguel Torres, Josh Burkman, David Branch), and combined them with top prospects (Marlon Moraes), and even featured some other curiosities, such as Tyrone Spong’s first foray into punching people without boxing gloves on.

The promotion gained a lot of traction coming out of that show, as well as the few that came after it, but the momentum fizzled out quickly, as problems behind the scenes (changes in management, conflict of interest allegations, multiple lawsuits), along with the loss of most of their name fighters resulted in a promotion that’s been surviving but has been limping along for a while.

In a world where the center of the universe is one company, it’s hard for a competitor to really make an impact. The closest anyone has come within the last five years has been Bellator, a company that started out making their name with tournament based fighting, a model that was ultimately scrapped when it was decided it wasn’t the best way to garner ratings.

So, do you know what the Professional Fighters League, the company the WSOF is officially becoming in 2018, is going to do to garner ratings?

That’s right! Tournament based fighting!

This thing is doomed from the start, isn’t it? Well, unless they are willing to sink a lot of money into generating interest.

Technically, what we’re getting, at least according to the information that was released last week, is a format where fighters compete in a guaranteed number of fights over a period of 10 months and the winners will then square off in some form of playoffs, with champions being crowned at the end of it.

Honestly, this doesn’t sound like a terrible idea to me. I was a big fan of Bellator when they did tournaments. It was a sound, logical way to create champions and contenders with an easy to follow criteria that didn’t just end up being “because the owner has a crush on her” or because “he’s the biggest money fight.”

What PFL is doing, or will be attempting to do at least, is create something that resembles the kind of schedule that athletes have in other sports leagues, with a regular season and playoffs. It’s a concept that’s been tried before in MMA (poor, poor IFL…) but it’s always good to see someone say they want MMA to be like the NFL or NBA or any other major sports league and then actually do something to back that up.

It’s a change of pace from Dana White spouting off about how big his company is while he continues to pay his “independent contractors” peanuts to risk injuring themselves with no clear path to a title opportunity other than to keep winning and hope the champion doesn’t end up pursuing a boxing fight instead.

With all the backlash the UFC has been getting from hardcore fans about booking what makes financial sense without any regards to rankings or anything else that would preserve even an iota of their integrity, maybe this is something we need in the MMA landscape.

That’s assuming, of course, the fans will actually support it, and some will but I doubt it will be enough to make the company viable for more than a few years.

I hate looking at it from the “glass half empty” perspective, and I’ve ragged on MMA fans before for how fickle they can be when it comes to who they support, which is true of sports fans in general, but it doesn’t make me very confident that this will result in any sort of groundbreaking entity and will more than likely just be something to add to the dustbin of MMA history (or the tombstone in Dana’s office of promotions he’s outlived).

Throughout MMA, we’ve seen the best and worst of MMA tournaments and leagues. UFC, of course, started as a tournament based company, with the format slowly fading away once it got in the way of the fights the fans wanted to see (and possibly because of concerns that having fighters fight multiple times in one night wasn’t helping them fix the image problem that resulted in multiple states literally banning the sport).

Outside of early UFC, the only other company that employed that style of fighting to financial success was Pride and their Grand Prix tournaments, which featured some of the best fighters in the world getting the chance to soccer kick each other in the face because PRIDE NEVA DIE!

Beyond that, there were glimmers of hope here and there. Strikeforce did a Heavyweight Grand Prix in a manner that was totally not copying Pride. *WINK* It was successful because it legitimized Daniel Cormier as a stud but it was unsuccessful because Cormier wasn’t even an original entrant in the tournament and only got in because Overeems are gonna Overeem.

And don’t even get me started on the IFL…GO RED BEARS!!!!

Honestly, who would have thought that a team coached by the man who Frank Shamrock slammed into retirement would do poorly? At least we had Tim Kennedy.

And, of course, there’s Bellator, who I thought was doing well with the tournament format, creating a number of name fighters who few people knew about before the promotion elevated them.

Hell, last Friday night’s Bellator 178 featured a title fight between Patricio Pitbull and Daniel Straus (…again), two fighters who became names because of the Bellator tournaments, which also produced Eddie Alvarez, Michael Chandler, Pat Curran, Joe Warren, Douglas Lima, Eduardo Dantas, and Liam McGeary to name a few.

It was a good system, but it was an imperfect system, running into the same problems UFC did. Namely, the tournament system was getting in the way of booking title rematches or other fights the fans wanted to see (or at least, fights the promotion assumed fans wanted to see).

As much as I don’t miss seeing Bjorn Rebney steer that ship, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the tournaments.

Just think of all the names Bellator created during those tournaments. Now, think of how many names they’ve created since then. Y’know, when they aren’t booking crash car freak fights between UFC has beens who have no business fighting in 2017 even though we’ll still watch because we have a serious problem and need help.

The success of something like a Professional Fighters League is really going to come down to the level of talent the promotion can acquire and how successfully the company can feature and promote that talent.

If PFL wants to succeed where others have failed, they are really going to need to invest in the fighters they sign and treat them like a big deal, even if no one else believes them to be. Show the lives these fighters lead outside the cage, show the struggle that it takes to make it to the cage, and treat what they do inside the cage like it’s the greatest thing anyone has seen.

If the PFL can do that properly and tactfully, they may be able to get somewhere with this concept. If we are given reason to care about the PFL and its fighters, we will. If the PFL can succeed in bringing legitimacy to the sport, especially as other companies make decisions that only hope to take away that very legitimacy, it could prove to have staying power.

If they can’t do it, then the PFL will probably just resemble a fancier looking Legacy Fighting Alliance or some other show that runs on AXS that I watch half-asleep, only jarring awake when Michael Schiavello yells something nonsensical, since that’s his thing.

Well, good luck, PFL. I hope you do well. I really do because, if there’s another major player in the MMA scene, it could lead to a lot of changes in the sport. A lot of good changes. I mean, a promotion that treats MMA like an actual sport? A promotion that offers a clear path to a title and awards merit instead of just Twitter followers? A promotion that respects its fighters and gives them a regular paycheck? If these concepts take hold, it’ll be a win for the future of the sport.

It’ll be huge. It’ll be a major achievement. It’d be like hitting a home run. If PFL can make it work, it’d be like winning the World Series…of fighting.

Crap. It’s not too late to go back to using that name, is it?

Evan Zivin has been writing for 411 MMA since May of 2013. Evan loves the sport, and likes to takes a lighthearted look at the world of MMA in his writing…usually.