The ramp up for Saturday night's Floyd Mayweather-Marcos Maidana Showtime PPV card hits full stride during CBS' afternoon college football lineup, with multiple 10-second promo spots slated to air on CBS Sports Network and at least one running during the 3:30pm ET game featuring Georgia-South Carolina. That punctuates a week in which the fight was pumped across CBS primetime and late-night programming, with about 20 gross ratings points worth of spots devoted to promotion of the fight.
That could be especially crucial considering the way the Ray Rice story has dominated the news cycle. "It has such legs that it has become a 24-hour topic on sports news shows, and non-sports news as well," said Showtime Sports Exec VP Stephen Espinoza. "So it has sucked up a lot of air in the room – and for good reason. It's a big story. But the way it has dominated, that means there's less room to talk about everything else."
This will be Mayweather's first fight with co-promoter Golden Boy since longtime CEO Richard Schaefer and COO Bruce Binkow left the company in June. Mayweather Promotions retained Binkow to manage sponsorship for this fight shortly after he left Golden Boy. The card features a sponsor lineup similar to those of the recent past, including Corona and O'Reilly Auto Parts.
"Really, not much has changed," said Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe. "It's not much different. We (Mayweather Promotions) haven't been the ones out in front talking about how we do this and we do that, because that's never been our style, but the fact is we have people in place and we've been involved in every aspect of these promotions for years. We have a staff here and we've been involved, working 16-hour days to make sure everything gets done. I wouldn't say we're more involved, because we've been involved. We just weren't out front as much."
