Debunking the PBC fighters can't fight on HBO Theory Myth and GGG's HBO contract

[jqSide]

I have yet to see Lara fight one of the Charlo brothers. They've been avoiding each other for years now. This is just one among many cases where Haymon fighters don't fight each other.

And didn't Lara called out the Quillin/Jacobs winner? Why is he hiding now? He probably forgot Quillin and Jacobs are fellow Haymon fighters.

So this notion that HBO and Haymon being able to work together would produce fights fans want to see is mere fantasy. Such myth should be debunked first before anything else.

[djt117]

Yeah I'm not sure why Andrade doesn't have more fans on NSB, he checks off all of the boxes that people love here. A couple years ago I thought he would definitely be a top fighter at 160 and kind of an Andre Ward type fighter (maybe not hugely popular, but one of the best). Sadly he seems to make one poor decision after another. He could have beat Korobov easily for a vacant 160 strap. He'd be a big player right now if he had that belt and could be in line for Canelo, GGG or Andy Lee & Saunders. History would have been altered but he chose to sit. To be fair though he simply might be more comfortable at 154 and if that's the case, that's cool, but I seem to remember him saying he was planning on campaigning at 160 and not go back to 154 iirc. I don't really know what's up with him.

Andrade is tight at 154 and has been for a long time.

When you factor that in with the reality that: (1) Andrade isn't with Haymon and Haymon controls about 80% of the Top 10 at 154, and (2) Middleweight is wide open below GGG and, (3) Dudes like Saunders are now getting $3 million offers just to help them get over the fear of stepping into the ring with GGG, and (4) GGG is a fight that Andrade could actually win (IMO) it seems like Andrade is wasting (and has been wasting) his chance to make some noise and ultimately make some really good money.

[original zero]

Scott -

Countless successful business plans have involved steadily losing money, often for several years, to gain control and leverage in the desired industry.

3.39 million people saw Danny Garcia. Way more than would have seen him elsewhere. You say we can't compare viewers, but you are the one that said the ratings were poor. But if more viewers are watching Danny Garcia than any other fighter, how can that not be viewed as a success?

To the casual sports audience, PBC fighters are the fighters they are watching and therefore, those are the fighters that are going to wind up being the biggest stars. You can cry apples/oranges all you want, but if 3x as many people see Garcia's fights than see Crawford's fights, who is going to be more well known?

Haymon is making an investment to raise the profile of his stable. Nobody expected ad inventory to sell out over night.

Thurman-Porter is listed as a PBC broadcast on the PBC site and was listed as a PBC fight at the press conference. If it winds up being produced by Showtime, how does that change the fact that Haymon's fighters are getting better exposure than TR & GB's fighters?

[brettWall]

I have yet to see Lara fight one of the Charlo brothers. They've been avoiding each other for years now. This is just one among many cases where Haymon fighters don't fight each other.

And didn't Lara called out the Quillin/Jacobs winner? Why is he hiding now? He probably forgot Quillin and Jacobs are fellow Haymon fighters.

So this notion that HBO and Haymon being able to work together would produce fights fans want to see is mere fantasy. Such myth should be debunked first before anything else.

That's why these discussions about promoters/networks should be working together don't really make much sense when Haymon is not even interested in pitting his top fighters against top fighters whether his own or not.

[M Bison]

This is what I hate about boxing, its just became the blame game for every damn little fine detail.

Put it this way If someone wants the fight to happen yet the rival promoters are asking for too much money this is what we call unfeasible, we have a lot of this stuff happening boxers turning down 2-4 million dollars because apparently get this, that's not enough.
Boxing really has became a sport driven by greed and I think the most greediest guys are in Haymons roster, we're the fans yes we want them to get paid well but when they're saying a few million isn't enough it become a hard pill to swallow.

I fully understand if a fight has massive attention to it that a fighter will want to make sure he isn't getting short changed but a lot of the recent cases are fighters trying to get unfeasible amounts of money.

All the winning don't just go to the boxers you know, promotions do need the cash infact they probably need it much more than the boxers do IF this sport is to continue to be one of the biggest around.

[djt117]

Scott -

Countless successful business plans have involved steadily losing money, often for several years, to gain control and leverage in the desired industry.

3.39 million people saw Danny Garcia. Way more than would have seen him elsewhere. You say we can't compare viewers, but you are the one that said the ratings were poor. But if more viewers are watching Danny Garcia than any other fighter, how can that not be viewed as a success?

To the casual sports audience, PBC fighters are the fighters they are watching and therefore, those are the fighters that are going to wind up being the biggest stars. You can cry apples/oranges all you want, but if 3x as many people see Garcia's fights than see Crawford's fights, who is going to be more well known?

Haymon is making an investment to raise the profile of his stable. Nobody expected ad inventory to sell out over night.

Thurman-Porter is listed as a PBC broadcast on the PBC site and was listed as a PBC fight at the press conference. If it winds up being produced by Showtime, how does that change the fact that Haymon's fighters are getting better exposure than TR & GB's fighters?

I disagree with this for many reasons ...

Some of that 3.39 million tried out watching boxing on Fox Saturday night -- but they may or may not tune in again. Saturday night was a darn good night of fights (especially with an all-action opener between Mansour and Breazeale), so hopefully many of them will return. Time will tell.

However, when you're dealing with the HBO / Showtime boxing viewers, you're usually dealing with either (a) hardcore fans or (b) slightly more educated "casuals". Here's why: a lot of people who watch boxing on HBO are primarily motivated by the boxing programming to subscribe in the first place (those are your hardcores). Then there's people who are like some of my "part-time boxing fan" friends. My friend Dave is the quintessential example of this but I have lots of other friends and acquaintances who fit the same profile. Dave and his girl are both into different shows on HBO but Dave figures, "so long as we're paying for it, I should 'get my value' from the channel" ...

... So, on the assumption that what HBO is offering is premium-quality championship boxing, he'll watch stuff that they put on -- maybe not always live, but eventually on On Demand. Needless to say, these days, Dave never misses a GGG fight. If you're HBO, you're going for viewers like my friend Dave.

The point I'm making here is that, when you have people paying for something already, it's easier to convince them to watch.

Watching Fox lifterally is casual viewing. I may tune in tonight, free of charge, and I may or may not ever tune in again. I have no "investment" to tune in again other than that which the fighters I just watched compel me to make by virtue of their performance.

Case in point: more people watched Omar Figueroa's last bout (in theory--i.e., discounting the Nielsen households who just left the TV on after college football) than watched Golovkin's last fight. By that logic, Figueroa should be selling out MSG. But (duh, obviously) that ain't happening ...

[i'm a fun haver]

Why aren't Haymon fighters fighting anywhere besides PBC networks or Showtime?
Where are all the Haymon fighters on HBO, if they are free to fight where ever they want?
Are you new?

[original zero]

DJT, the people that are already paying may be more motivated to watch than those that aren't paying, but when you aren't charging, you vastly expand your potential customer base.

Look, you could put the Super Bowl on PPV and make a lot of money. But slowly, over time, putting the sport behind a paywall will erode the relevance of the sport and run off the vast majority of the viewers.

And that is exactly what happened to boxing.

But Haymon looked at the situation. A situation where HBO is only paying $30 million a year, which has to be split among various promoters, while the networks are paying BILLIONS for other sports.

As long as HBO was allowed to run the sport, even if Haymon killed off every non-Haymon promoter and had complete control of HBO, the pie is still only $30 million.

So the only way to create a $100 million pie like UFC has is to invest the money to prove that boxing can work as a network sport. So far it's pulling in similar numbers to what UFC pulls in. Even if Haymon has to spend $500 million over three years to prove his concept, if he ends up with a $100 million a year TV deal at the end, it was money well spent.

The old way of doing things only allowed you to make peanuts compared to other sports. Maybe Haymon will succeed or maybe he'll fail, but the route he's taking was the only logical way to attempt to achieve his goal. HBO was never going to go back to the days of $100 million a year boxing budget.

So now he's got to convince someone else to do it and convincing someone else to do it is going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. But he's got the time and he found the money.

If he can get the same ratings as UFC, he will find a buyer for his content. The networks care about 18-49 year old eyeballs. Yes GGG would garner more eyeballs than Figueroa if he was put on network TV, but GGG isn't being offered to network TV. Figueroa is and Figueroa pulled in way more eyeballs than he had any right to.

Look at these NBC & Fox broadcasts that have done MILLIONS of viewers. At a time when networks are paying out the ass for live sports. I know some of you don't understand Al's plan and that's fine. I don't think he cares if you understand. All he cares about is millions tuning in to network TV and so far they have.

[Scott9945]

Scott -

Countless successful business plans have involved steadily losing money, often for several years, to gain control and leverage in the desired industry.

3.39 million people saw Danny Garcia. Way more than would have seen him elsewhere. You say we can't compare viewers, but you are the one that said the ratings were poor. But if more viewers are watching Danny Garcia than any other fighter, how can that not be viewed as a success?

To the casual sports audience, PBC fighters are the fighters they are watching and therefore, those are the fighters that are going to wind up being the biggest stars. You can cry apples/oranges all you want, but if 3x as many people see Garcia's fights than see Crawford's fights, who is going to be more well known?

Haymon is making an investment to raise the profile of his stable. Nobody expected ad inventory to sell out over night.

Thurman-Porter is listed as a PBC broadcast on the PBC site and was listed as a PBC fight at the press conference. If it winds up being produced by Showtime, how does that change the fact that Haymon's fighters are getting better exposure than TR & GB's fighters?

Of course there are exceptions, but steadily losing money usually means going out of business. Especially when the funding runs out. Supposedly PBC has already burned through half of that. Of course Al still gets his 15% "advisors fee" from his overpaid talent.

The rating for that fight was pretty good, even considering the time was bought by PBC. But recent PBC cards like Wilder's last fight and Jacobs-Qullin (which was a good match up) had dismal numbers. You seem to have faith that exposure will make this all work, but I disagree.

[djt117]

DJT, the people that are already paying may be more motivated to watch than those that aren't paying, but when you aren't charging, you vastly expand your potential customer base.

Look, you could put the Super Bowl on PPV and make a lot of money. But slowly, over time, putting the sport behind a paywall will erode the relevance of the sport and run off the vast majority of the viewers.

And that is exactly what happened to boxing.

But Haymon looked at the situation. A situation where HBO is only paying $30 million a year, which has to be split among various promoters, while the networks are paying BILLIONS for other sports.

As long as HBO was allowed to run the sport, even if Haymon killed off every non-Haymon promoter and had complete control of HBO, the pie is still only $30 million.

So the only way to create a $100 million pie like UFC has is to invest the money to prove that boxing can work as a network sport. So far it's pulling in similar numbers to what UFC pulls in. Even if Haymon has to spend $500 million over three years to prove his concept, if he ends up with a $100 million a year TV deal at the end, it was money well spent.

The old way of doing things only allowed you to make peanuts compared to other sports. Maybe Haymon will succeed or maybe he'll fail, but the route he's taking was the only logical way to attempt to achieve his goal. HBO was never going to go back to the days of $100 million a year boxing budget.

So now he's got to convince someone else to do it and convincing someone else to do it is going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. But he's got the time and he found the money.

If he can get the same ratings as UFC, he will find a buyer for his content. The networks care about 18-49 year old eyeballs. Yes GGG would garner more eyeballs than Figueroa if he was put on network TV, but GGG isn't being offered to network TV. Figueroa is and Figueroa pulled in way more eyeballs than he had any right to.

Look at these NBC & Fox broadcasts that have done MILLIONS of viewers. At a time when networks are paying out the ass for live sports. I know some of you don't understand Al's plan and that's fine. I don't think he cares if you understand. All he cares about is millions tuning in to network TV and so far they have.

I completely get Al's plan and I agree with virtually everything you said.

Only thing I do disagree with is that now that there's so many other avenues (both legally and illegally) to get most of the content (like, shows & documentaries) that HBO offers, live sports would grow in importance because kind of like news, sports' value is in its "freshness". How many times have you put an NFL game on DVR and successfully shut yourself off from finding out the result for 2 days until you got the chance to watch it on a Tuesday? Probably never.

Once you know the result, watching the whole thing anew loses its appeal-- particularly for the casual fan. The hardcores will watch a fight because they'll want to see "how a fighter looked" but the casuals are only interested in the result. Point is, even in a world w/o PBC, I could see the % of HBO's budget that it devotes to boxing rising in the coming years.

But that's neither here nor there.

The point is that if Al Haymon's PBC enterprise could get to the point where it is coming a *solid* 2nd behind a LeBron James-headlined Cavs game (instead of being in a virtual 3-way tie with NCIS and figure skating), then he's going to win and he's going to get the $100 million rights deal you're talking about and he's going to take over boxing. And frankly I don't think that scenario is very far off. Haymon just needs to make some critical adjustments like stacking his good cards in the first 7 months of the year to avoid conflicts with football season, which is like a left hook to the liver for boxing TV ratings.

I'm a boxing fan--no one who proclaims to be a fan of boxing can say "I hope PBC fails". If it does, it'll be 100 years before anyone has the balls and the resources to try and make boxing mainstream again and we'll be relegated to 100 years of nichedom. Of course I want PBC to succeed.

What sucks in the interim though is that the only way it can succeed is by freezing out rivals and starving them to death.

My main gripe with PBC/Haymon fanboys (i.e., Fl0mos left without a home following Floyd's retirement) is that they assert that guys like Kovalev and GGG are intentionally ducking PBC fighters when that obviously not the case. There's not a single fighter in the PBC stable against whom Kovalev or GGG would not be favored. Any honest fan can admit that.

I would have no problem if the PBC kids simply said:

"Yeah, you know what, obviously GGG would fight any Haymon fighter -- "afraid of Lara, lol, no, obviously GGG would kick the everloving Christ out of Lara ...

... the reason those fights aren't getting made is because in order for PBC to achieve its goal of bringing the sport under one umbrella, rival promoters need to be shut out. And while that sucks for boxing fans at the present time, it'll be all worth it once Haymon's project succeeds and he gets a rights deal and there's a tremendous infusion of cash into the sport that will help bankroll fights between elite fighters in the sport"