Matthysse-Postol averages 642K viewers; Broner-Allakhverdiev averages 506K viewers

By Boxing News - 10/07/2015 - Comments

postol100(Photo credit: Naoki Fakuda) By Allan Fox: Last Saturday’s boxing cards on HBO and Showtime put in dreadful ratings numbers. The low numbers might be explained by the fact that the two cards were competing against each other, which is never wise to do.

Further, the cards had completion from college football, and that obviously didn’t help things. On HBO “Boxing After Dark”, the Lucas Matthysse vs. Viktor Postol averaged just 642,000 viewers with a peak of 814,000 viewers from the StubHub Center in Carson, California. The Matthysse-Postol card averaged 663,000 viewers.

That’s obviously not good. The co-feature bout between Humberto Soto and Antonio Orozco averaged 698,000 viewers with a peak of 798,000 viewers. Orozco won the fight by a controversial 10 round unanimous decision in a fight that a lot of boxing fans thought Soto won. That might have turned off a lot of the fans that tuned in to see the card.

Soto controlled the fight and wound up getting arguably robbed for his efforts. It’s surprising that the Soto-Orozco fight did almost as good as the main event between Matthysse and Postol. When you see things like that it suggests that the fans weren’t too thrilled by the match-up.

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The Matthysse-Postol fight wasn’t very exciting because of the running and holding that Postol did all night long before scoring a 10th round knockout after hurting Matthysse with a right had that injured his left eye.

On Showtime Championship Boxing, the Adrien Broner vs. Khabib Allakhverdiev fight averaged 506,000 with a peak of 609,000. The card averaged only 400,000 viewers. This was not a good match-up at all. Broner’s adviser Al Haymon should have looked to match Broner against a better fighter with a larger fan base than Allakhverdiev.

Broner ended up knocking the Russian fighter out in the 12th, but the fight was one-sided enough to have it ended much earlier than the 12th. It was more of a mismatch than Broner’s fight against John Molina. Broner’s fight against Emmanuel Taylor, who is ranked well below Allakhverdiev, was a much more competitive fight than the Broner-Allakhverdiev mismatch.

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After the fight, Broner gave a hint that there will be even worse mismatches to come for him, when he said that he’s interested in fighting Mayweather Promotions fighter Ashley Theophane, who isn’t ranked in the top 15 by any of the sanctioning bodies.

Broner said he won’t be told who he can fight. A fight between Broner and Theophane would have been a decent confidence builder type of fight for Broner after his losses to Marcos Maidana and Shawn Porter, but not now. He’s the WBA light welterweight champion now, and it makes no sense for him to be fighting 2nd tier fighters that aren’t ranked in the top 15.

It’s going to come down to the WBA whether they want to sanctioning fights between Broner and non-ranked fighters like Theophane.

In the co-feature bout, IBF super featherweight champion Jose Pedraza vs. Edner Cherry fight averaged 338,000 viewers with a peak of 514,000 viewers. Pedraza won a controversial 12 round decision that upset a lot of boxing fans. It wasn’t a very entertaining fight because Pedraza circled the ring much of the night and chose not to mix it up with Cherry.



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