Overnight Rating For Second "UFC On Fox" Telecast Down 23% From Debut

Fox earned a 2.7 overnight Nielsen rating for its second UFC telecast on Saturday night, a two-hour tripleheader featuring Rashad Evans' defeat of Phil Davis. That rating is down 23% from a 3.5 overnight for Fox' first UFC telecast on Nov. 12, a one-hour telecast featuring Junior Dos Santos' defeat of Cain Velasquez for the heavyweight title. Fox should win the night among adults 18-49. Saturday night's telecast grew throughout the night, with the first match featuring Chris Weidman-Demian Maia earning a 2.3 overnight, followed by the Chael Sonnen-Michael Bisping bout earning a 2.9 overnight and the Evans-Davis finale earning a 3.4 overnight. Las Vegas and Louisville topped all U.S. markets with a 4.1 local rating, followed by Indianapolis, Greenville-Spartanburg, Tulsa and Knoxville with a 3.9 overnight (Austin Karp, THE DAILY). In Tampa Bay, Tom Jones writes Fox has had “some rotten luck,” as Saturday featured three fights that “all went the distance, making for a boring night.” That comes after the first in November “featured one fight that lasted less than one round.” Fox needs to “use these prime-time events to give us more of the up-close-and-personal stories that we used to see on old Olympic coverage” of boxing (TAMPA BAY TIMES, 1/30).

MUCH OBLIGED: ESPN.com’s Josh Gross reported days after “dismissing a cyber attack launched against UFC.com, UFC president Dana White said he welcomed another assault on the online hub of his promotion.” White on Thursday said, "Keep hacking our site. Do it again. Do it tonight. These guys look like terrorists now, and a bill that was about to die is about to come back." Just after 3:00am Friday morning, Anonymous -- the “collective responsible for online attacks against corporations and U.S. government websites -- hacked into the back-end of UFC's web page.” The “incursion, Anonymous promised, was Round 1 to #OpUFC, a topic that ... trended globally overnight on Twitter.” The online attack on UFC.com was “apparently prompted by UFC parent company Zuffa's support for two pieces of federal Internet anti-piracy legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA)” (ESPN.com, 1/27).