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By Zach Arnold | October 20, 2008

The company is reportedly out of the MMA business.

Update: ESPN, on their channel newsticker, announced the news of Elite XC shutting down. The crawler also says that EXC promoters are ‘still under investigation’ by the Florida Boxing Commission.

Reports: Sherdog | MMA Mania | Bloody Elbow | Sports Illustrated

Remember, Jeremy Lappen was only saying days ago how ‘excited’ he was for Elite XC’s future.

If you believe Dave Meltzer’s report, then the Elite XC ‘stand-up scandal’ involving Seth Petruzelli and Kimbo Slice supposedly stopped CBS in its tracks from purchasing Elite XC. To review the history of the ‘stand-up scandal,’ just click here and read all the stories.

Meltzer was adamant in a radio interview that both CBS and Showtime were thrilled with the third Elite XC show, but once the Petruzelli scandal hit, the corporation didn’t want to be involved in the stand-up scandal and all of the ‘fixed fight’ media coverage.

As for CBS’s future in MMA, Meltzer claims CBS will do one of two things:

1) Wash their hands of MMA

2) Go with Affliction

He claims that Affliction’s payroll is so high that they would need PPV and need 175,000-200,000 buys to break even with CBS, but CBS isn’t going to pay that kind of money for a show with Fedor headlining.

Adam Swift adds more credence to Meltzer’s report with this follow-up:

Multiple sources told MMAPayout.com in the week leading up to the 10/4 event that the deal was all but complete with the paper work already drafted. There were even preliminary conversations regarding the return of Gary Shaw to the equation. The deal ultimately collapsed under the weight of Standgate and possibly CBS’s financial condition.

Gary Shaw, the same person who told the LA Times that he didn’t find anything ethically wrong in encouraging fighters to stand-up during fights.

Company assets

In regards to questions about who gets the first rights to purchase or obtain Elite XC’s assets, the answer is… Showtime Networks Inc..

Quick reaction

This doesn’t surprise me, although I am happy to hear that CBS was not interested in bailing out Elite XC. Much in the same line that Fuji TV pulled the plug on PRIDE, CBS pulled the plug on Elite XC. As I asked in a previous post on this site, why would Viacom or any CBS shareholders go to bat for a scandal-tainted company? There was no value in them doing so, given how much PR damage they could suffer from it. It goes back to the question I asked in regards to how CBS would react to pressure from shareholders or from outside interests once the stand-up scandal grew legs — and the response became very clear, as we can now see. You can have shady people involved in an MMA promotion, but if that promotion can’t do business in a self-contained manner and has to rely on a corporate sugar-daddy that wants control, then that MMA promotion has no margin for error at all.

On a personal note, I find intriguing that (once again) several MMA web sites got caught with their pants down when it came to trying to avoid covering a scandal in the fight business. We know a ton of MMA web sites that refused to cover the PRIDE yakuza scandal, which led to the demise of that organization, and a few big MMA web sites that ignored the stand-up scandal only to watch Elite XC close its doors.

Topics: Media, MMA, Pro Elite, UFC, Zach Arnold | 22 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |