As a professional mixed martial artist, it’s clear that Punk didn’t make the cut. His debut was so underwhelming, in fact, that Dana White has already made overtures about the pro wrestler moving on from the UFC.
Except, that probably won’t happen. Because for as much as Punk fell short as a legitimate MMA competitor, he exceeded expectations as a pay-per-view draw for the UFC, accounting for a buy rate that only a handful of active fighters have surpassed.
According to Marc Raimondi of MMA Fighting, UFC 203 is trending to be a bigger event than UFC 183: Silva vs. Diaz (~650,000 PPV buys) and perhaps even UFC 182: Jones vs. Cormier (~800,000 PPV buys). Since 182, there are only three fighters to have drawn larger paying audiences: Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey and Brock Lesnar.
Heading into 203, UFC pay-per-view guru Dave Meltzer estimated that the card without Punk would do somewhere between 250,000-300,000 buys — a range that sounded right on the money looking at recent PPVs with comparable star power. Stipe Miocic, Fabricio Werdum and Urijah Faber were 203′s other big names, and UFC 198: Werdum vs. Miocic did approximately 350,000 buys, benefiting from a stronger card from top to bottom.
Where Meltzer and most others went wrong, however, was in predicting the drawing power of Punk, one of the WWE’s most popular fighters leading up to his departure from the squared circle in 2014.
“This is what I’ll say: Anything over 270 (thousand PPV buys) is because of Punk,” Meltzer said on The MMA Hour. “Because I was looking at this and I was thinking this is probably, you know, 250-300ish (thousand), right? Probably below 300 (thousand) when you take Punk out. So if it does 400 (thousand), then Punk was a hell of a draw. … If somehow it does 500 (thousand), then I completely underestimated the pro wrestling audience.”
