By Dan Ambrose: Last Saturday’s fight between IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev (28-0-1, 25 KOs) and Nadjib Mohammedi (37-4, 23 KOs) brought in an average of 1.014 million viewers with a peak of 1.028 million viewers on HBO Championship Boxing from the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In contrast, the fight between former WBA light heavyweight champion Beibut Shumenov and BJ Flores brought in an average of 241,000 viewers with a peak of 422,000 viewers on NBCSN, according to Dan Rafael. The co-feature bout between Jean Pascal and Yunieski Gonzalez on the Kovalev-Mohammedi card outperformed the Shumenov vs. Flores fight as well in averaging 883,000 viewers with a peak of 1.028 million viewers on HBO.
“NBCSN is in about 81.5 million homes. HBO is in about 36 million homes,” Rafael said on his Twitter. “Over on HBO, Pascal-Gonzalez averaged 883k, peaking at 1.028M viewers. The Kovalev-Mohammedi main event averaged 1.014M, peaking at 1.082M. Saturday’s boxing telecast headlined by Shumenov-Flores on NBCSN averaged 241,000 viewers, peaked at 422,000. #boxing.”
The fact that Kovalev was able to bring in huge ratings fighting a guy like Mohammedi is pretty impressive. If he can bring in good ratings fighting unknowns then it means that when Kovalev does eventually fight someone like Andre Ward, it’s going to be a huge fight, and big enough for HBO pay-per-view.
It’s too bad that boxing fans will likely have to wait until 2016 or 2017 before Ward finally moves up to the 175 pound division to face him.
What this tells you is that there was a lot more interest in boxing fans wanting to the well-known Kovalev and Pascal fight, even though they weren’t matched up against highly recognizable opposition.
Had Kovalev and Pascal been fighting their opponents on NBCSN instead of HBO, you could have expected much bigger numbers from them given that it’s free television. This suggests that if Premier Boxing Champions are going to be televising Shumenov and Flores’ fights in the future, they’re going to need to either match them against a well-known fighter or place them on an undercard rather than in a main event like they were.
Shumenov clearly doesn’t have the name to be fighting in a main event as this time, even though he was beaten not too long ago by Bernard Hopkins on Showtime. Shumenov did not impress in the Hopkins fight, and for that reason he needed to be on an undercard rather than in a main event.
Shumenov boxed his way to an impressive 12 round unanimous decision over the 36-year-old Flores, and made the old veteran look inept for someone with so much experience. It was a totally one-sided fight in the last six rounds with Shumenov clowning Flores. He made him look flat-footed. If this is all Flores can do against one of the more limited cruiserweights in the division, I think he might want to retire and focus his career as a boxing analyst rather than a fighter. I believe there are much better fighters in the cruiserweight division than Shumenov and Flores, guys like Krzystof Wlodarczyk, Rakhim Chakhkiev, Thabiso Mchunu, Dmitry Kudryashov and Victor Ramirez.
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