When your face is plastered over the NFC Championship game at the height of the coverage, you know someone is trying to make a lot of money out of you. Conor McGregor and everything that went along with his appearance at UFC Boston, questionable comparisons with boxing legends aside, was designed to make money. And he did it, for himself as well as for the UFC and Fox.
Other fighters may complain about his rise up the rankings but it's no easy thing to have the marketing hopes of an entire division heaped on your shoulders. If, given the resources that were pumped into the McGregor gravy train, the Dubliner failed to draw the requisite numbers for Fox Sports coverage of UFC Boston, everything could have come crashing down quicker than it was built up.
As you can see, McGregor delivered.
Last nite, UFC Fight Night on @FOXSports1 posted 1.7 ovrnite; projects to rank as net's highest-rated and most-watched @UFC event ever.
— Lou D'Ermilio (@FOXSportsLouD) January 19, 2015
That all important 1.7 refers to Nielsen rating. (Net's refers to network's) So in layman's terms, that means that for all the houses in the US that have a television, 1.7% of them were tuned in to Fox Sports 1. Taking into account that there was a crossover with the AFC Championship game, it's no exaggeration to say that the McGregor hype train delivered in spades.
Given that the Nielsen rating is taken from a sample of households it's next to impossible to get exact figures for how many were watching but given that there's 115.9 million households in the US with televisions, that equates to a rough viewership of 1.97 million people. If there was any doubt about just how important Conor McGregor could be to the UFC and MMA as a sport, that has now gone flying out the window.
The folks over at Awful Announcing, who are pretty much the experts in all things US sports media related, have opined that Fox (and the UFC) pumped so much resources into the McGregor angle that if the Boston show failed to deliver, they would have to right back to the drawing board for the featherweight division and find a new cash cow.
As it is, McGregor has passed the big ratings test and they look set to ride that cow for as long as it will keep going. The pay-per-view figures for McGregor vs Aldo are going to be huge.
H/T: Ciaran Boyle
