UFC on Fox Will Get the Sports Treatment, but Full Facelift Not Until January

When the UFC signed its new seven-year television deal with Fox, UFC president Dana White said that he sees this landmark partnership as an opportunity for an upgrade.

“I look at this Fox deal as a fresh start for us, so I want to change everything,” he stated. “I want to change the look of the pay-per-view, graphics, show open, the show opens in our Fight Nights, everything’s going to have a different feel to it.

“We’ll be working with these guys, I love what they do in sports, and to enhance the look and feel of a UFC event.”

The new-look UFC won’t debut at the first UFC on Fox with Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos on Nov. 12, however.

“The way that this thing is gonna start is, this thing is gonna be a Fox Sports show, the first fight that we do. The November fight is just a bonus fight,” stated White. “We don’t get into business with Fox until January. So everything will change in January.

“The Fox fight is gonna be different. There are things that we’re doing differently and we need to pull off in that production, but all the big change is happening in January. There is no way in hell I could change everything by November.”

As it is, he hasn’t even had time to figure out what to do with the rest of the fights on the first UFC on Fox fight card.

“That’s the last thing I’m worried about right now,” White said.

The Fox broadcast is slated to feature just one fight, the heavyweight title bout between Velasquez and dos Santos, but there will be a full fight card at the Honda Center that night.

Rest assured the UFC and Fox will come up with some sort of plan for the one-hour telecast in case the main event ends quickly, but that could mean anything from inserting pre-recorded undercard fights to some sort of highlights package or anything in between.

Of course, White always has Facebook to fall back on. The promotion has consistently utilized the popular social networking site to live-stream preliminary card bouts that aren’t slated for broadcast elsewhere.

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