10 Ways Scott Coker Can Improve Bellator To Compete With UFC

3. Let The Fighters Be The Face Of The Organization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HziG9DBfJf0 You know what Bjorn Rebney did really well up until the final year or so of his time in Bellator? He didn't try to be Dana White. He was low-key. He didn't get in people's faces, and he didn't get into Twitter "beefs" with competitors. In the final year, that seemed to change. Dana White (who needs to learn this lesson himself, badly) started calling him Bjork, and Rebney found himself lured into the fray. He wasn't as aggressive as White, but he still should have taken the higher road. Some of it was actually pretty simple, and not so bad at first glance. Look at White's Twitter post after Eddie Alvarez reclaimed the Bellator lightweight title in the fall of 2013: "I€™m hearing Djork oops Bjork got served a big fat plate of Karma tonight :) Congrats Eddie!!€ to which Bjorn replied "If Fight of the Year & 10 times better ratings than you did on your last televised show is Karma, bring me another plate" Now, Bjorn had a point, especially at first glance. After the first attempt at a Bellator PPV fell apart due to Tito Ortiz being injured, Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler 2 moved to free TV on Spike, and wound up being one of the best lightweight fights of the year - just like their first fight. When you look a little closer, however... "10 times better than the ratings you did on your last televised show" is where things start to get iffy. Look, it's not that he's wrong, it's that it's apples and oranges. And the fans knew it. The UFC event he's referring to was UFC Fight Night 30: Munoz vs. Machida. It aired early on a Saturday afternoon, since the event was held in the UK, and that hurt it. It was the first UFC event on Fox Sports 2, which has far fewer viewers than Spike, Fox Sports 1, etc. It totalled about 122,000 viewers on first airing. So while Alvarez vs. Chandler 2 had 1.1 million viewers (which isn't quite 10 times better, but close enough), it did so with a vastly wider potential audience in a key timeslot with arguably more promotion as a "big" event. Fight Night 30 was an afterthought dumped on a bottom-tier channel and would probably have been on Fight Pass were it booked today. It's like saying "my best beat your worst" and it didn't really help Bjorn any. Things just went downhill from there. Bjorn should have avoided all of it by taking the high road. Coker needs to learn this lesson - don't get dragged in the crap-slinging fests Dana White sometimes likes to start. Stay out of the spotlight. He seems to have a better relationship with White than Rebney did, but the best thing he can do is work from the shadows, and let the fighters be the face of the promotion. We're all tired of Dana White trying to be the face of the UFC over the fighters; it's something Coker can easily avoid. He did it with Strikeforce really so he just needs to pick up where he left off.