By Dan Ambrose: WBC light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson’s recent mismatch against #5 WBC Dmitry Sukhotsky on December 19th brought in horrible ratings on Showtime Championship Boxing for their fight at the Colisee de Quebec, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.
According to Dan Rafael of ESPN, the Stevenson vs. Sukhotsky mismatch brought in an average of just 323 thousand viewers on Showtime. Those ratings are incredibly poor, especially when you compare them to the huge ratings that Stevenson was routinely bringing in in 2013 in his fights against Chad Dawson, Tony Bellew, Tavoris Cloud and Darnell Boone.
In 2014, Stevenson fought only twice in beating Andrzej Fonfara and Sukhotsky. The troubling thing about this is Stevenson had the opportunity to try and make big fights against Bernard Hopkins, Sergey Kovalev and Jean Pascal in 2014. One can only imagine the huge ratings that Stevenson would have produced had he fought those three guys in 2014 instead of Sukhotsky and Fonfara.
The Fonfara-Stevenson fight averaged 672,000 viewers on Showtime earlier this year. Those aren’t great numbers, but they’re not nearly as bad as the 323,000 that the Stevenson-Sukhotsky fight averaged.
“Stevenson-Sukhotsky bout averaged 323k viewers. #boxing,” Dan Rafael said on his Twitter. “That is BY FAR Stevenson’s weakest viewership of any of his 5 premium cable fights (2 on Showtime, 3 on HBO). Was less than 1/2 the viewership of Stevenson’s last fight vs Fonfara (672k) in May (1st on Show). Overall, 12/19 card averaged only 268k. Stevenson gone from averaging about 1.2M viewers for ’13 fights to only 323k for last fight. From fighter of year candidate to afterthought. I’d guess Stevenson’s massive drop-off in viewership for fights from 1 year to the next has to be unprecedented for a premium cable fighter.”
Stevenson’s viewer stats aren’t likely to get much better if he winds up facing Fonfara in a rematch in April of 2015. Stevenson’s promoter Yvon Michel is kicking around the idea of putting Stevenson back in with Fonfara for a rematch, even though Stevenson beat him by a non-controversial 12 round decision earlier this year. If the first Stevenson vs. Fonfara fight averaged only 672,000 viewers, I don’t see how a rematch would bring in any better numbers on Showtime.
If anything, you’ll likely see Stevenson’s ratings drop further because it’s not a rematch that the boxing public is demanding right now. Ultimately, the decision to televise the fight will fall on Showtime’s shoulders. But if they were willing to televise the Danny Garcia vs. Rod Salka mismatch in 2014, then you can imagine that they’ll give the green light to a rematch between Stevenson and Fonfara.
Comments are closed.