The crowd was well behaved and also pretty on top of MMA in general. I roamed alot during the show and I heard at least 5 separate conversations about Dana White’s interview with ESPN regarding steroids from the day before. And most knew a decent amount about the specific IFL fighters as you pointed out. It was a good crowd.

As soon as I entered, I walked in with dozens of people wearing the TSk Fight Team shirts. They were there early to see the two TSK fighters in the prelims. The first thing I thought about was your rant about TSK a week ago. They were certainly loud.

Some of my negatives. The fighters will have been announced and the seconds would leave the ring. only then would the ring girls be instructed to prance around the ring holding the Round 1 sign. This 20 seconds with the fighters raring to go and the ref just standing there was pointless. Have the ring girls walk around as the ring is being cleared.

Due to the TV tapings, sometimes the fighters and ref would stand there post fight waiting for the decision while the ring announcer held it in hios hand for 20-40 seconds. The rest of the time between fights was very fast paced with little time in which there was not fighters in the ring.

You are right about the energy draining out of the crowd when a team match was clinched. It looked like 20% of the crowd actually left after the Pitbulls clinched. While it was a bummer, I guess it shows how much the team aspect of the league is catching on.

I noticed right away as well that the graphic showed that Horodecki and Palaszewski were suddenly not scheduled to fight each other in the GP despite the announcements earlier in the week. Weird.

Overall a pretty damn good show.

I all honesty, that is what is holding the IFL back, they NEED to do LIVE SHOWS. Seriously, it would increase thier veiwership by 50% and that is no joke. A savvy move by the IFL would be to show the Grand Prix, all the best fighters in the IFL, Live on FSN & My Network T.V. at the same time. It would make some serious waves and would be awesome to watch live.

I want the IFL show the fights live, like on Monday nights, Monday night MMA. The IFL could triple it’s profits in 1 year if they started showing all the fights live. They need to start asap.

Antonio McKee and Delson Heleno should be ashamed of themselves. Compubox numbers would probably have the punches and kicks in single digits! You would think that since that since the playoff implications were over, these guys would try to put on a show to excite the loyal fans who stayed. It was the exact opposite. The funniest thing was McKee’s smoking hot wife got more cheers than her husband.

One thing I disagree with is the energy really wasn’t there until the second half. The fans were very vocal for the hometown Pitbulls and only stood up and cheered the second half. Prior to that, the crowd was pretty sedate. Ben Rothwell, one of the more heavily promoted fighters, got next to no reaction from the crowd. The biggest pop in the first half was when the show Andre Arlovski on the big screen. This really underscores one of the problems with the IFL: the lack of star power.

Everyone seemed to get the whole team concept and got behind the local team, but the problem is that there’s too much going on. Its Renzo’s team (people wore Renzo Academy shirts, not Pitbull ones). They’re called the Pitbulls and there’s a bunch of fighters we don’t know. Most of the fans that were around me just refered to the color of the shorts (ie. red team, blue team).

The place was pretty packed so they must be doing something right, but as you said with the 3-0 results, the energy flies our the door and many people exited early. There’s still many kinks to work out with the format. I enjoyed the show, but I don’t see IFL making more waves without some of their guys becoming bigger stars or stealing some from the UFC.