LAS VEGAS – From a pay-per-view standpoint, 2014 might be regarded as the UFC's lost year.

Dana White protects the UFC's business secrets as if he were trained by the CIA, but even the UFC president concedes that the company suffered in pay-per-view sales this year.

View photos Ronda Rousey (L) takes down Alexis Davis during their women's mixed martial arts bantamweight title bout at UFC 175. (AP) More

No one knows for certain how bad it has been. The UFC does not release its pay-per-view numbers and so any figures you may come across on the Internet are only estimates.

Given that pay-per-view sales come from a variety of sources – numerous cable, satellite and telephone companies, all with competing interests, sell the events and calculate their own sales totals – there is no one person outside of UFC headquarters who has all the accurate information that can put it all together and come up with a correct figure per event.

That's just a fact.

But if the ever-optimistic White says sales were down, then there is no question that sales are down.

Some, particularly those with interests in boxing, have interpreted the drop in PPV sales as a decline in interest in mixed martial arts generally and the UFC specifically.

It could be that's the case, but I doubt it. No one at Fox, either publicly or privately, is complaining about its deal with the UFC. Reebok just came aboard as a title sponsor for the UFC's new uniforms, and the UFC is on the verge of a major sponsorship deal with Monster Energy Drinks.

Most likely, the pay-per-view sales decline stems from the fact that the UFC's biggest names fought so infrequently in 2014. Forget about all the complaints regarding the so-called over saturation problem, because the majority of those excess cards aren't on pay-per-view.

If Jon Jones, Georges St-Pierre, Anderson Silva, Ronda Rousey, Cain Velasquez, Nick Diaz, Chael Sonnen and Anthony Pettis had each fought three times on pay-per-view in 2014, the conversation would be vastly different. Those eight are, arguably, the UFC's best draws, and between them, they made just four appearances in 2014.

Injury, drug test failures, retirements and holdouts made a mess of the UFC's pay-per-view main events in 2014.

Rousey fought twice, but not after July. Jones and Pettis each fought once, while St-Pierre, Diaz, Silva, Velasquez and Sonnen did not fight at all.

UFC 182 is on Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden and it will give a clearer picture of where the company is in terms of interest. The main event that pits Jones against No. 1 contender and arch-rival Daniel Cormier is one of the rare recent bouts that not only figures to sell big but which has fully captured the casual sports fan's interest.

The winner not only will emerge with the UFC's light heavyweight title, but also as the No. 1 fighter in the world.

Egged on by White, the UFC's promotional and marketing team has never met a feud it didn't love. So often, it markets the fights as "feuds" if the athletes dare to say even one cross word to each other. Middleweight Michael Bisping has made a good living at creating feuds out of nothing.

This is one case, though, were the feud is not made up. Jones and Cormier definitely don't like each other, and emotions will be at a fever pitch when they step into the cage to settle their differences on Saturday.

This is a fight that should sell a significant number of pay-per-views. While it would be asking a lot for it to hit a million sales – boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather Jr. could not reach one million sales in either of his two 2014 fights, and he's unquestionably the biggest PPV draw in the industry – it isn't unreasonable to expect UFC 182 to get close to 750,000 sales.

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