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Filed under: Featured, News, UFC

A snippet of sparring footage reignited interest and debate surrounding the Aug. 26 boxing match between UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor and pound-for-pound boxing great Floyd Mayweather. But is it all just hype and edits in the end? MMAjunkie columnist Ben Fowlkes and retired UFC and WEC fighter Danny Downes discuss.

Fowlkes: Let me set a scene for you, Danny. It’s Friday night. I’m relaxing with a glass of port (Kokanee) in my study (garage), and my phone buzzes. It’s an email from the UFC. Subject line: “Conor McGregor vs. Paulie Malignaggi sparring footage.”

So naturally, I open this email and click the link so fast that I nearly break my thumb. Can you blame me? All week the headlines have been dominated by talk of what supposedly happened in this sparring session, and now we’re finally going to the videotape. The magic eye don’t lie, Danny.

Except when I click the link I get 10 seconds of sparring footage, and there’s clearly at least one edit in there. What I see is Malignaggi eating a legitimately stiff left hand from McGregor. Then there’s a cut in the video. Then I see Malignaggi going down while McGregor yanks on his head.

Malignaggi is not pleased by this turn of events. He feels like the UFC spliced together some footage to make McGregor look good at his expense. And to some extent, I’d say it worked. McGregor managed to look pretty good against a former two-division world champ. But are we just watching some carefully edited wolf tickets here? And if so, does it matter?

Downes: What you’re seeing is a little bit of panic. For all the hype surrounding Mayweather vs. McGregor, the closer we get to the actual fight date, people don’t seem that interested. Sure talking heads on ESPN or FOX Sports keep yapping about it, but now it’s football season. Tickets aren’t flying off the shelf as anticipated, so they have to spice things up.

What are the two biggest complaints about this carnival fight? 1) Conor McGregor has no chance, and 2) It’ll be a boring 12-round decision. To achieve the numbers the promoters want, you need a lot of casual fans to press the “buy” button. And those same exact people still remember the sting from Mayweather vs. Pacquiao.

How do you combat these problems? You have Mayweather go on ESPN and say that Conor McGregor has the edge “on paper” while admitting that he’s lost a step. Mayweather isn’t known for being the most humble fighter on Earth, so when he criticizes himself, it really means something. What people fail to realize is that Mayweather likes money more than he likes compliments. If he has to call himself old to increase the buy rate, he’ll do it.

What I think the sparring footage was a direct response to, though, was the media day workout. Let’s just say that McGregor looked less than stellar on the heavy bag. There are people who believe “Mystic Mac” is out there playing three-dimensional chess and planning 20 moves ahead, but the average person watches the workout and thinks, “Welp, this is going to be a blowout.” Look at how the betting lines have moved in recent days.

The carnival was in desperate need of some fresh blood, and voila, some edited sparring footage drops. I wouldn’t call this wolf tickets, because that suggests some large, coherent strategy. I think the powers at be are nervous that their cash cow may not be as profitable as they’d hoped.

Then again, maybe I’m selling all the parties involved short. This is still going to make a boatload (I believe that’s a metric measurement) of money, isn’t it? Is the Mayweather-McGregor train running at full speed, or is it struggling just to reach the station?

Fowlkes: I have to admit that I’m impressed with how all sides have continually found new and innovative ways to keep the fight constantly in the news as the date draws nearer. After the borderline embarrassing media tour, there seemed to be a swift backlash from a lot of mainstream forces. You had people essentially predicting cultural disaster, and not in the fun way.

This required a response, but the problem was that the media tour had already ratcheted up the personal animosity meter as far as it would go. It wasn’t enough to have these two guys just keep calling each other names. What followed was this beef with Malignaggi, which might have been the best thing to happen to the Mayweather-McGregor fight.

That’s because, when this all started, McGregor’s boxing skills were an unknown. As in, we didn’t know if he really had any, because he’s never had a boxing match. There was sparring footage even before this (remember Chris van Heerden, who also complained of edited video before releasing the raw footage himself?) but it wasn’t much to go on. And how could a guy with no boxing matches beat the best boxer around?

But now the hype machine has managed to turn the lack of information into a feature rather than a bug. When there’s so little McGregor boxing footage out there, a 10-second sparring clip is bound to get a ton of attention.

You might very well ask why the UFC didn’t release video of the whole round, but the truth is you already know why. It’s because the unknown is what’s helping to sell this fight. If we don’t know whether or not McGregor can really box, then we have to at least allow for the possibility that he might be a preternatural boxing genius.

But the news cycle is such that even this will only carry you so far. There are still two weeks to go until this fight. The question I can’t help but ask myself is, what’s coming next?

Downes: You may be on the edge of your seat asking that, but none of it makes you more likely to buy the actual fight. The drama may be fun and give people something to talk about while the UFC takes a hiatus, but it’s all sizzle and no steak.

At the end of the day, the main selling point of this fight is “anything can happen!” As an MMA fan, it’s a familiar refrain. Remember Daniel Cormier vs. Patrick Cummins? A complete mismatch sold on the premise that anything could happen. Cummins beat Cormier one time at wrestling practice. Let’s make a No. 1 contender fight! How did that work out?

Maybe a better example is Jon Jones vs. Chael Sonnen. Any serious person knew Sonnen had no chance of beating Jones. It was a complete mismatch, but Sonnen talked a good game and he had some quality one-liners to deliver. Fans may have been entertained in the buildup, but they didn’t want to watch the actual fight. The circus fight barely did better than Jones vs. Machida at UFC 140.

After months of hype and discussion, everyone involved is starting to realize what we knew from the beginning – there’s no substance here. Perhaps they thought they’d find a storyline better than “these guys like money” along the way, but it hasn’t come to fruition. So they’re going to stick with what got them there in the first place, and that’s gimmicks. This week it was a carefully edited sparring video, maybe next week Ido Portal shows up with his pool noodles.

There are a lot of people who want to watch this fight. That’s fine. I’m not in the business of telling people how to spend their money. But don’t pretend for a minute that you want to watch the fight out of some serious consideration for the sporting aspect of it. That’s what these videos are trying to sell, and I’m not buying it.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Danny Downes, a retired UFC and WEC fighter, is an MMAjunkie contributor who has also written for UFC.com and UFC 360. Follow them on twitter at @benfowlkesMMA and @dannyboydownes.

Filed under: Featured, News, UFC