Coker: Changes Coming To Bellator In 2015

“If we have a show every week, sometimes you have to get fighters to fill the card because there’s nobody left,” he said. “That’s what you’re not going to be seeing next year. You’ll see big fights that people will want to see, starting in January.”

“They’ve been working with our team,” he said. “It’s like one big team. Before, I felt there was separation when I walked into the building, a division between Bellator and Viacom. Now, everyone is working on the same page for the same goal and I think you’ll be seeing the results of that. I talked to Kevin (Kay) and we came to the consensus that we’re taking this company to the next level. Let’s build some stars. We’ve been very successful at identification and star building in the past. We’ll have some legends fights. And we’ll put them all on free television before 100 million households. We thought that was a better model than going into the pay-per-view business. That doesn’t mean pay-per-view is out. If the situation is right, we’ll do it.”

“Our job is to put on the best fights,” he said. “Showtime had the right to approve the matchmaking, which is completely different. We can match make our own fights here. Their infrastructure is much bigger than Showtime’s. It’s a different animal. At Showtime, we were really a vendor. We provided a product for them. Viacom owns Bellator, it’s fully integrated, and they are going to use all their assets to grow the product. It’s a different animal than the last opportunity. I’ve never had so many people in the room working on one thing, which is to grow this company.”

New Bellator President, Scott Coker sat down with the media following yesterday’s fight night with some interesting insight into the future of the Bellator MMA promotion.

(Quote via Dave Meltzer of MMAFighting.com)