MMA Nation - Bjorn Rebney Interview Series: Bellator, Cole Konard And Spike TVhttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/33343/mma-icon.png2011-08-24T09:28:57-07:00http://mma.sbnation.com/rss/stream/21457982011-08-24T09:28:57-07:002011-08-24T09:28:57-07:00Bjorn Rebney On How Bellator Differs From UFC And Cole Konrad's Place Among Heavyweights
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<p>Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney continues his conversation with The MMA Encyclopedia author Jonathan Snowden about his promotional style and Bellator heavyweight Cole Konrad.</p> <p>Yesterday, in <a target="_blank" href="http://mma.sbnation.com/2011/8/23/2378603/bjorn-rebney-spike-bellator-television-MMA-news-to-grow-the-sport">part one of an exclusive interview</a>, Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney talked about a potential move to Spike and how to move the sport of mixed martial arts forward. Today, Rebney talks about his top heavyweight, his promotional strategy, and what goes in to running a string of consecutive live events.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: I've enjoyed, but not everyone has because I've seen the criticism online, the opportunity to see a fighter grow in front of our eyes from neophyte to champion. How much has <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/122986/cole-konrad">Cole Konrad</a> improved since joining the promotion?</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>I thought his performance last Saturday night was amazing, an amazing step forward in his maturation. If you had asked me to bet my house that my family and I live in that Cole Konrad was going to spend the first 10 minutes of a three round fight standing with a guy who has made his living in mixed martial arts from day one trying to knock people's heads off, I would have said 'you're out of your mind.' I would have said that strategically Cole is going to look to set up the takedown with a couple of punches and he's going to take Paul down.</p>
<p>For him to have this kind of development - you know, look - Paul is not going to look to put you in a triangle. He's not going to look to outwrestle you. He's never done that in any of his fights in his career. He's going to look to put you to sleep with his right or left hand. That's what he does. So for Cole to be able to take, what I believe, is the best wrestling in the heavyweight division of mixed martial arts, cast it to the side, and say 'Okay, I'm going to stand with this guy for two rounds.' And actually win the first two rounds standing with Paul, I thought an amazing step forward.</p>
<p>There are fans who are not yet in love with Cole Konrad's style. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But for a guy who's been with Cole since the very first fight he did on a smaller promotion's show under our banner, to a guy who I think is rounding out his arsenal and his repertoire to a point where he would be very dangerous against anybody in the world at 265, I love what I see. He's a great kid. He's a terrific young man. He's going to law school and he's bright as can be. He's a great guy to work with. A true professional and he's consistently expanding the breadth of his game.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: Sounds like you liked what you saw.</b><i><br></i></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>I liked what I saw. But I understand that some fans are not wrestling purists. There's a lot of fans who respond unbelievably well to the <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/125020/seth-petruzelli">Seth Petruzelli</a> knockout of Ricco. Some fans respond really well to the back and forth fist flying battle we saw in Sandro versus Curran. There are different types of fighters out there and as fans get more familiar with mixed martial arts and more familiar with how a fighter is progressing I think there will be more appreciation for the kind of stuff we saw from Cole.<b><br><br>Jonathan Snowden: </b><b>It brings up an interesting issue about what a promoter's role is in helping someone like Cole Konrad decide what their fighting style is going to be. You're acknowledging that some people don't enjoy a wrestling based game. Some promoters, notably Dana White and Zuffa, have incentivized fighters to employ what they consider a more fan friendly standup game.Do you see it as part of your role to help decide how a fighter is going to approach the bout? </b><i><br></i></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>I've always felt pretty strongly that the essence of what makes Bellator different is that all that matters in Bellator is that you win. We are a real sport format. Everything that happens in front of those cameras in our cage is about objectivity. If you win, you move on. If you lose, you go home.</p>
<p>I've never said to <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/123065/ben-askren">Ben Askren</a> 'you need to hit people more.' I've only said to Ben 'just keep winning.' If you look at every fight that Ben Askren has had beneath this banner he has probably collectively lost about a minute and five seconds over every single fight. I think the essence of what makes Bellator Bellator is that it's tournament based. You win and move on.</p>
<p>It's like if you're a football fan you may love three yards and a cloud of dust. If you are a fan of that type of offensive structure, you're probably going to be a fan of the Ben Askren's, and the Joe Warren's, and the Cole Konrad's. If you're kind of<a target="_blank" href="http://www.profootballhof.com/history/release.aspx?release_id=1738"> circa Air Coryell</a>, early San Diego Chargers from years ago, or the St. Louis Ram's "greatest show on turf" you're probably going to be more apt to love a <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/129773/pat-curran">Pat Curran</a> or to love a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/130354/rene-nazare">Nazare</a> or a Patricio Pitbull.</p>
<p>There's different fighters for different tastes. The only thing I think is really relevant is are you the best? However you get to being the best is completely and totally up to the fighter.</p>
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<center><b><a target="_blank" href="http://mma.sbnation.com/2011/8/20/2374261/bellator-48-results">Bellator 48 Results</a> | <a target="_blank" href="http://mma.sbnation.com/2011/8/21/2375680/video-pat-curran-kos-marlon-sandro-at-bellator-48">Pat Curran's KO of Marlon Sando</a></b></center>
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<p><b><br>Jonathan Snowden: Everything is a progression. Paul Buentello is an important kind of bout to take and win. Where can Cole go with Bellator though? I just read an interesting article on Yahoo about the dearth of heavyweight talent out there. Do you worry about running out of high end fighters in that weight class? Where are you going to find appropriate competition for a guy of his caliber? It seem like an issue many of your guys might eventually run into.</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>We're building them. We've had some amazing signings over the last year. You've seen our 135 division is now populated with some incredibly talented fighters. I think our 145 division is the strongest in mixed martial arts....we're trying to accomplish the exact same things at heavyweight. We've brought in some great new talent, we've got some terrific fighters coming into the next tournament which kicks off in season five.</p>
<p>The bottom line is, it's going to be very, very unlikely regardless of where you pick the fighter from on Earth, that anyone is going to go to the ground and beat Cole Konrad. The essence of a gameplan against Cole Konrad is, obviously, to try to figure out a way to keep the fight standing and try to engage Cole Konrad such that you don't set yourself up to be taken down. And we have some guys that are training very, very hard not only to win this tournament, but also to effectuate that kind of result. We'll see. We'll have a $100,000 tournament champion crowned before Thanksgiving and at that point we'll have a new challenger for Cole.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: How many people does it take to make Bellator run smoothly. You guys run a lot of events in a condensed time. It seems like quite an operation.</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>We've got a production team of about 60 personnel that travel with us around the country and go to every single event. We have a group of independent feature producers and folks that work with us to create a lot of the content you see on the televised show. Before we ever get there, they're working. And we have an operational team that works for us full time out of the offices in Chicago. There's a good group of people. I've got a lot of good people working for me who are very vested. I'd rather have a smaller number of people who are hugely vested and live this like I do than I would have a huge number of people who maybe aren't as vested or aren't as focused.</p>
<p>When we go into a market we have 60, 65, 70 people traveling with us who are taking care of different elements, carrying out everything from fighter arrivals and departures in our Bellator vans, to coordinating travel from an airline perspective, coordinating hotels, working production, the set up of all of our big screens. Lighting setups and audio systems that travel with us around the country. There's a lot of people that go into making something like this fly. But we've been doing it for a lot of years. And, gosh, we're almost at 50 events now that have been nationally televised. We've got a good team that really knows what they are doing at this point.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: Well, you've got a couple of weeks to rest and recharge. You didn't give yourself much time off. Hope you can enjoy a little bit of a vacation.</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>Thanks. I'll rest in about 15 or 20 years from now. For now, I'm going to keep riding the wave brother.</p>
https://mma.sbnation.com/2011/8/24/2381445/bjorn-rebney-interview-bellator-ufc-cole-konrad-mma-newsJonathan Snowden2011-08-23T05:28:08-07:002011-08-23T05:28:08-07:00Bjorn Rebney On Spike, Bellator Finances, And How To Grow The Sport
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<p>The MMA Encyclopedia author Jonathan Snowden interviews Bellator's President Bjorn Rebney on the promotion's television future. The two discuss Spike, MTV, and how to build the sport in 2011.</p> <p>Bellator finished off their fourth season last weekend with a bang, an epic high kick knockout that crowned <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/129773/pat-curran">Pat Curran</a> as the featherweight tournament champion. With a few weeks off before the fifth season begins in September, Bellator President Bjorn Rebney had a chance to finally sit down with the MMA Nation crew to discuss an ever changing MMA landscape.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: Every time I interview you the experts suggest it will be the last time. There are huge concerns from the outside about Bellator's fiscal health. Where are things? More than half way through the year are you confident about the future?</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney:</b> Yeah. Things are going extremely well. We're in a very good place. As is the case whenever you're trying to build company up, whether it is a year and a half or two years or whatever timeframe you are in that building stage, you're trying to work through investment capital and get to the promised land. It always takes time. The build up is never a sprint, it's a marathon. We've finally reached that blessed point of a cash flow break even company. Where every dollar going out is met by a dollar coming in. We're in a really good spot, I spot I predicted we'd be in when I set up the model more than two years ago. We're in that position and we've got an incredible TV partner in MTV Networks and things are going very, very well.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: Speaking of television, I have to ask you about a potential move to SPIKE. Is this something we can expect in 2012?</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>From the very start I've been clear that Bellator's partnership on the TV distribution front is with MTV Networks, the larger corporate entity that controls MTV, MTV2, VH1, Comedy Central and Spike amongst a collection of others. We've been very fortunate to have a great alliance with MTV2 that's been growing in terms of numbers, growing in terms of ratings, growing in terms of audience share, and expanding the demographic that watches mixed martial arts. That's been a great relationship. That's who our partnership has been with. That's our broadcast partner and we're going to kick off season number five on September 10th and go every week for three months. You'll be able to see Bellator on MTV2 as part of that alliance we have with MTV Networks.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: What does it mean that people have spotted Spike representatives at your shows?</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>A lot of people are asking this question. They've seen different individuals from Spike at our events. That's the magic of having a relationship with MTV Networks. You're able to leverage the expertise and the vision and the experience of the team at Spike that's really responsible for bringing mixed martial arts to the general market. We have this incredible, incredible group of people that we're able to talk to and get their thoughts on everything from inside the truck production elements, to the feature pieces we do on fighters, to our graphics packages, to everything you could possibly conceive of going on in a televised mixed martial arts event. There could not be a better group of people to give suggestions and thoughts. They're as good as it gets.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: You couldn't ask for a better fight to end your summer series than Curran-Sandro. What do you think can be done to give tremendous fighters like that some traction with the audience?</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>We can keep doing a lot of what we are doing. We can expose fighters like Pat Curran and <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/122485/marlon-sandro">Marlon Sandro</a>, or Mike Chandler and the Pitbull brothers, to an 82 million home universe on MTV2. We can keep doing the kinds of things we're doing with the likes of <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/129566/joe-warren">Joe Warren</a>, <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/122521/eddie-alvarez">Eddie Alvarez</a> and some of our other star fighters where we're putting them on other programs under the MTV Networks banner. Joe was on a highly rated episode of Impact Wrestling on the Spike network.</p>
<p>We're doing a lot of things like that to keep the PR machine working to promote spectacularly talented top five in the world caliber guys. Everything we can do to get the names of those fighters bigger, to try to get the audience more engaged, to try to get what we call their "Q" scores to a higher level. To just let people know who they are and what they are about. </p>
<p>We immediately put the <a target="_blank" href="http://mma.sbnation.com/2011/8/21/2375680/video-pat-curran-kos-marlon-sandro-at-bellator-48">Pat Curran highlight up on youTube </a>and it's immediately getting tens of thousands of views. It's a hit. People are watching it over and over and over again. It's a lot of things working in unison to get these guys out there. To build up their stardom and the brand of Bellator.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: Who do you see as a "Bellator" fan? Is it a hardcore MMA fan? A channel surfer? An MTV2 viewer?</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>That's a great question. I think it's all of the people you just mentioned. I think when you see, whether it's Mania or Elbow or Junkie or Sherdog or whoever it is, when the boards light up the way they did post fight, when the comments light up the way they did post fight, when the coverage lights up across the endemic market the way it did post fight Saturday night, you recognize that the hardcore fans are paying attention. The hardcore fans are watching. </p>
<p>At the same time, it's incumbent upon me, it's incumbent on the company, and it's incumbent upon you guys running the sites that people are really paying attention to consistently day in and day out to expand the breadth of that audience. Consistently try to bring in more general market consumers. Because the bottom line is, if you gave me a 100 people who had never seen a mixed martial arts event, and they went to a great event and that sat somewhere in that arena, about 98 out of a hundred are going to want to come to another one. About 98 out of that hundred are going to want to watch it on television. And they're going to become hooked because it's a terrific and incredible live event and televised event experience.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: How do you create programming that is attractive to both MMA superfans and the casual fan watching for the first time?</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>The key is to focus on providing an event that is at a really high qualitative level. That's real sports competition and tournament based. Where you're telling the great stories behind the athletes. To design that event so hardcore fans of mixed martial arts can really enjoy it and have a great two hour experience, or four hours if they are watching it in the venue, but remain cognizant that our job is to keep expanding that base. To keep expanding those numbers. You have to be welcoming to those people who have not yet embraced what I think is the greatest sport on Earth.</p>
<p><b>Jonathan Snowden: When you strike that balance, it's definitely something special. Another place where you seem to look for balance is in the tournament selections. It's a good mix of new fighters and Bellator veterans. How do you decide which fighters get to come back?</b></p>
<p><b>Bjorn Rebney: </b>It's a measurement that we go through as a team. I sit down with Sam Caplan and our talent development team and we work through who believe are top, top up and coming prospects and stars. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloodyelbow.com%2F2011%2F5%2F9%2F2162599%2Fmfc-welterweight-champion-douglas-lima-signs-with-bellator&rct=j&q=douglas%20lima%20bellator&ei=QhpTToa-Nsu5tgeB_eHKCQ&usg=AFQjCNF7EyoyJz_wma64PnohgI6x6dlq7A&cad=rja">The Douglas Lima's of the world at welterweight</a>, the<a target="_blank" href="http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2011/4/5/2092725/according-to-sherdog-com-nova-uniaos-eduardo-dantas-has-signed-with"> Dantas's of the world at bantamweight, </a>and different guys that we look at and think 'wow, this guy could be a monster.' <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/128509/vitor-vianna">Vitor Vianna</a> has <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2011/5/4/2153323/bellator-fighting-championships-has-signed-3-ranked-middleweight">incredible potential</a> at middleweight but no one has seen him. <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/126883/luis-santos">Luis Santos</a> who has 46 wins and is <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2010/11/25/1836145/world-mma-welterweight-scouting-report-5-luis-sapo-santos">finally getting his shot on the big stage</a>.</p>
<p>We look at those fighters and we look at the fighters we have under contract that have competed for us in the past. We ask 'which of these guys can compete for us at an elite, world class level?' You look at a guy like a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mmamania.com/2011/1/7/1922150/brent-weedman-confirmed-for-bellator-season-4-welterweight-tournament">(Brent) Weedman</a> and you look at his technical proficiencies. His striking ability, his ground game. You've got to bring a guy like that back. You've got to give him another shot because he was so close to making it to the finals last time. There's a lot of thought processes that go into it. We start out, literally, before each tournament with a list of over 100 guys and we just keep breaking it down and breaking it down until we've got what we think is a great final eight.</p>
<p><i>Tomorrow, more from Rebney including how he and Dana White have a different promotional vision, <a class="sbn-auto-link" href="http://www.sbnation.com/mma/fighter/122986/cole-konrad">Cole Konrad</a>'s place in the heavyweight division, and what it takes to put on a season of Bellator fights.</i></p>
https://mma.sbnation.com/2011/8/23/2378603/bjorn-rebney-spike-bellator-television-MMA-news-to-grow-the-sportJonathan Snowden