Cage Fury Fighting Championships Signs Broadcast Deal with CBS

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Cage Fury Fighting Championships has signed a broadcast deal with CBS Sports Network which will bring at least six of the New Jersey-based organization’s events to television in 2015.

Promotion officials recently confirmed to Sherdog.com that the company’s first CBS-aired event will be CFFC 48, which takes place May 9 in Atlantic City, N.J. The event will be broadcast on tape delay and is tentatively scheduled to air on Thursdays and Sundays.

CFFC 48 will feature a welterweight title fight between former Bellator champion Lyman Good and Nah-Shon Burrell, as well as a bantamweight title bout pitting Jimmie Rivera against Carson Beebe.

“The landscape is going to change drastically in 2015.” CFFC CEO Rob Haydak told Sherdog.com.

CFFC’s growth has been incremental. Before signing the deal with CBS, the promotion aired its events on local TV. Haydak credits the progress to having reasonable goals.

“The slow and steady growth, we never bite off more than we can chew. Everything has been methodical because it’s been a business approach,” he said. “We don’t have these delusions of grandeur. It’s been a systematic approach.”

Haydak is also very realistic when speaking to that business approach. He credits general manager and matchmaker Arias Garcia for putting together the right type of fights to make CFFC successful.

“From Day 1, I always identified that we’re going to live and die by ticket sales,” Haydak stated. “I think that’s where other promotions fall flat: 80-90 percent of tickets sold on a regional level from my experience come from the fighters themselves. You have to find a good balance of fighters who will sell tickets from fighters out of the market. When you see other companies who are considered national companies, they just can’t sell tickets.”

Despite the success and movement up from shows in local resorts and casinos, Haydak’s focus still remains the same as ever. Expansion beyond the northeast strongholds that they’ve established isn’t part of the plan.

“For us, we’ve got to be a profitable company. Other promotions don’t have necessarily that same mindset,” Haydak said. “I have skin in the game. We have skin in the game. We don’t plan on being a traveling circus.”

With Jonavin Webb the latest among the organizations’s stable of fighters to get the call up to the UFC, the CFFC has become a promotion worth watching for a number of reasons. In addition to Webb, CFFC veterans such as George Sullivan, Paul Felder and Aljamain Sterling now ply their trade in the Octagon. It’s been a selling point for a number of fighters looking for a regional promotion. Haydak said it’s a matter of simply providing the proper setting for success.

“There’s no promotion that gets a fighter to the UFC. That’s a direct result of the fighters, the trainers, the team,” he said. “We provide a platform that gets them the most prepared. The transition is easier. The feedback that I get from guys like Sullivan and Felder is they don’t notice that big difference. They are much different than us. But from how we handle guys in the back of the house to the front of the show, we do a very good job of that.”