By the time Matt Brown and Erick Silva made their way to the cage for the main event of Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 40 event in Cincinnati, it was about 12:30 am local time. Those hardcore fans who had showed up in time for the evening’s first bout – a violent first-round finish of Anthony Lapsley at the hands of Albert Tumenov – had been there for at least six hours by then. In that six hours they’d seen just under two hours worth of actual fighting.

Day had turned to night. Saturday had given way to Sunday. The FOX Sports 1-televised main event was just getting started.

This is a problem for the UFC, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. If anything it seems to be getting worse, so much so that when there are still two fights left on the card and only a half-hour left on the broadcast, you have to look at the decision to toss it back to the studio for more empty banter and wonder if the UFC and FOX Sports are actively trying to make sure that every broadcast runs over its allotted time.

Forget your DVR, your sleep schedule, your actual life. Do you or do you not want to be a fan of the UFC? If so, you’ve got to prove it by sitting through all manner of endless nonsense just to get to the good stuff, the best stuff, the stuff that the UFC should be making it easier rather than harder for fans to see.

That’s not what happened on Saturday night, thanks to the excruciatingly slow pacing of the UFC’s FOX Sports broadcast, where fights are sprinkled in like a treat for those souls brave or desperate enough to sit through the UFC commercials in order to get to the other UFC commercials disguised as content. Instead what happened is that the UFC managed to hide one of the best fights it’s had in months. It turned primetime programming into late-night TV for a large portion of the country, and why? Because it just had to run that UFC 173 promo for the 67th time?

I know European fans who routinely stay up past 5 in the morning to watch UFC events live will roll their eyes at the petty complaints of a spoiled American, but at least they know what they’re getting into. I started watching last night’s event with three friends. By the time the co-main event rolled around, I was down to one. By main-event time, it was just me and a halfway conscious pal drifting in and out of sleep on my couch. This should have been the fight people showed up for, and instead it became the one they couldn’t quite make it to.

That’s the real trouble here for the UFC. It’s not just that media types like me want to get on with it already so we can file our stories and go to bed (though, sure, that’d be nice). It’s that it is consistently taking what should be the gem of its broadcasts and burying it in the sand. It’s making it harder for people who aren’t quite hardcore fans yet to see the very fights that might transform them into hardcore fans. It’s exacting this weird toll for being an MMA fan, then acting shocked when more people don’t seem to want to pay it.

We talk a lot these days about what it costs to be an MMA fan. This many pay-per-views per year. That much a month for a UFC Fight Pass subscription. The occasional splurge for a live event or a DVD. That top-tier cable package you wouldn’t even bother with if you didn’t absolutely need the hazy splendor of FOX Sports 2 in your life.

But that’s just the money. Keeping up with this sport also costs time, and a lot of it. That feels like a worthy investment when we get something like that Brown-Silva fight, which featured one of the best first rounds in recent memory, but those don’t come along every weekend, and the extent to which we’re all still shouting about it today is proof.

The UFC needs to stop acting like it’s doing us a favor by giving us “free” cards choked with filler. It needs to respect our time. It needs to stop making it harder than it needs to be to love this sport. And it needs to do it now.

For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 40, stay tuned to the UFC Events section of the site.

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MMAjunkie’s Matt Erickson recaps the action from UFC Fight Night 40: