The many virtues of the UFC's move to 'Go Big'

Looking at the UFC 194 lineup the other day, I felt like I was having a flashback. Not the bad kind, either. I’m talking about the kind where, for a few brief moments, you forget what year it is and think you’re back in a bygone golden age, only somehow without losing all the modern conveniences like smart phones and Twitter beefs.

To be honest, I think it was the Demian Maia vs. Gunnar Nelson fight that did it. That might seem weird, because, even for the nerdiest jiu-jitsu nerd, it’s not the best fight on the UFC 194 card. It’s not even the second or the third-best fight, at least as long as you’ve got Chris Weidman vs. Luke Rockhold in the co-main event, and Yoel Romero (finally) taking on Ronaldo Souza right below that.

But, see, that’s the thing about it. That’s what tells you that there might be something different going on here.

Because, in recent years, a fight like Maia vs. Nelson would be main event stuff. Maybe not for a pay-per-view, but for UFC Fight Night: Scranton? For an event in some far away city that sounds like something out of “Game of Thrones”? For a lesser offering on Fight Pass or FOX Sports 1? Sure, it’s not hard to imagine a fight like this being the carrot that the UFC dangles out there just to pull you through an otherwise lackluster card.

That it ends up instead as one more awesome fight on an already awesome fight card – one featuring two title fights, at least one top contender fight, and a women’s strawweight fight that feels uncommonly and immediately relevant – that suggests that maybe UFC executives have heard our over-saturation complaints and taken them to heart.

Then again, maybe all it means is that the UFC has been burned by injuries and late withdrawals enough to understand the need for a few good back-up plans in this business.

There’s ample evidence for that theory in the new “Go Big” campaign. Just look at the lineup for the month of December. The day before UFC 194, you’ve got an “Ultimate Fighter” Finale with a featherweight headliner between Frankie Edgar and Chad Mendes, either of whom could fill in the next night should something unfortunate befall either Jose Aldo or Conor McGregor. That TUF Finale also includes a solid lightweight contender eliminator between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson, so even if you did have to pull Mendes or Edgar you’d still have something left over that’s worth tuning in for.

You look at it now and it seems like common sense. You go back and look at the last couple years and it starts to seem more like hard-earned wisdom.

By all indications, the UFC is on track for a monster year on pay-per-view. This, after a couple very rough ones. It’s a comeback year, is what it is, and it’s as much about a difference in strategy as about luck and good timing.

And, let’s not kid ourselves, luck and timing are a part of this. It sure helps to have UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey finally breaking out of the MMA bubble and into cultural phenomenon territory at right around the same time that McGregor finds his stride. It also helps not to have absolutely every card decimated by freak injury at the last minute.

But what we see with the UFC’s “Go Big” campaign is a strategy that takes into account both the existing assets and the nature of the business. This is the approach to scheduling of people who know all about the bad things that can happen to the best-laid plans. This is what it looks like when you hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

It’s also, perhaps, what it looks like when you stop telling yourself that pro fighting can be a boom business year-round. Lately the UFC seems to have embraced this, opting to make big pushes a couple times a year, even if it means letting a few weekends go by between events.

And, to be honest, that feels like the right way to do it. It feels more like the way it used to be, when we’d spend weeks thinking and talking about next card, letting the anticipation build until the anointed Saturday night finally arrived. That’s how you make this feel like something special, rather than something routine.

And if going big means having enough arrows left in the quiver to cover the almost inevitable gym catastrophes that befall people who fight for a living? Maybe it’s the way forward into a future so bright it resembles the past.

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.