At this point, we have no clue about needles, who moves them and who doesn’t. Relatively speaking, the only people that really seem to move any needles are either retired, Ronda Rousey or Conor McGregor, right? Especially when you read what Nate Diaz’s manager, Mike Kogan, said to Bloody Elbow today about his client’s latest non-communication with Dana White.
It seems like Dana has placed Nate in a special little purgatory,over these negotiations, but Kogan doesn’t seem to understand why. Nate has pulled in solid ratings over just about all of this peers in the lightweight division, so what’s the deal? We don’t know. The revelations in this interview by Nate Wilcox raise far more questions than answers. The only way to react to these things are with declarations with hashtags in front of them. #FreeNate.
“I reached out to the UFC before the Donald Cerrone/(Jim) Miller fight even happened and said ‘hey, how about we fight the winner? Nate beat both of them, they’ve both since fought 4 times and won, you know’, and they said ‘oh you know, let’s see how the guys are after the fight, maybe they’re banged up, maybe there not’. Next thing you know, they announce the fight with Khabib. Then Khabib blows his knee like 15 minutes later and now they’re saying he’s gonna be fighting Eddie Alvarez who’s not even signed with the UFC yet. And we asked for that fight when Michael Johnson got injured. We hit up the UFC and said ‘hey we’ll fight Thompson’. That was like 10 day notice, you know. We said maybe ask them if they’ll do like a little higher weight, like a catch-weight, you know like 160 or something, so it’s short notice. And they said ‘no, we have it figured out. Don’t worry about it’.
“The latest show which was a phenomenal card. I mean it was a great card, great fights. You know Robbie Lawler fought Matt Brown in the main event it was a great fight. It did 2 million over nights and 2.5 million in total. I mean, if he doesn’t move the needle then neither does anybody else in the UFC, then nobody else should be making any money. So my point was, I just put out the numbers that have been released before, and I said ‘if he doesn’t move the needle than these numbers must not be impressive or they must not move the needles.”
“And then (Donald) Cerrone did a fight with Miller, they were on FS1. I understand (that) it’s not the same number of viewers, because in the U.S. FS1 is available in like 83 million homes and FOX is available on 125 million homes, but we’re also talking about an average rating of 640,000. I mean that’s not moving the needle in my book, but anyway I’m not a needle specialist so I don’t know”
