‘Do the Super Bowl on the Moon’: UFC and ESPN navigate uncharted waters with UFC 306 at Sphere

Dana White was so preoccupied with whether or not he could produce a UFC show at Sphere that he didn’t stop to think if he should.

That’s not an actual quote from anybody talking about the UFC CEO — it’s line borrowed from the classic film Jurassic Park — but the idea behind it remains the same as the MMA promotion seeks to put on “greatest live combat sports show anybody has ever seen” for UFC 306 at Sphere in Las Vegas on Saturday.

The $2.3 billion arena that features a 16K resolution wrap around LED screen on the inside, and 580,000 square-feet of LED display on the outside, was built as a venue to house concerts, films and special events but not necessarily sports. White vowed to change all that after he was blown away by his experience at a U2 concert he attended alongside NFL legend Tom Brady.

The challenge White presented to his production team was finding a way to not only incorporate the unique and stunning visuals provided by Sphere to the live audience in attendance but also figure out how to then translate that experience to fans at home. The UFC ended up hiring a slew of specialists to help build out the production for the card, including 14-time Emmy winner Glenn Weiss, who produces live award shows like the Oscars, and even bringing in members of the team that helped orchestrate Taylor Swift’s massive Eras tour to take on this seemingly impossible endeavor.

Over $20 million later, the UFC finally unveils its version of Sphere on Saturday night.

“You go in these arenas, they’re made for sports,” Glenn Jacobs, the vice president of production for MMA at ESPN told MMA Fighting. “Yeah, the Super Bowl gets played in different [stadiums] but they’re football stadiums.

“This would be like saying ‘Do the Super Bowl on the Moon.’ Go figure that out. That’s essentially what this is.”

A 32-year veteran at ESPN, Jacobs has seen just about every major sporting event that’s ever been produced but even he was gobsmacked at the idea that the UFC was going to take a card to Sphere. The layout inside the venue didn’t lend itself to a live sporting event so that created all sorts of new obstacles for the production team to tackle leading into the Sept. 14 event.

“It’s almost hard to describe,” Jacobs said. “It’s so different. This is not apples and oranges. These things are completely different. Think about when you go to a UFC event, what are the basic things? There’s a big overhang over the octagon where the lights are, there are monitors — but where do your lights hang? What Craig [Borsari, UFC head of production] and his team are doing is so remarkably ambitious that it’s hard to even describe to you.

“There’s the stuff that’s going to be clearly spectacular for fans. There’s going to be these really creative little mini-movies, the set, the whole look is going to be unbelievable. Really it’s the whole event is being recreated. It’s completely different thing.”

Because UFC 306 is serving both as a pay-per-view and a love letter to combat sports in Mexico, the show goes beyond the typical broadcast as well as what fans see in the arena.

As previously revealed, the plan is to show six films that are set to air between each fight on the main card telling the history of combat sports in Mexico. Each film is only approximately 90 seconds long but together it’s like a puzzle the requires each piece to fall in place to tell the whole story.

There are also going to be much different visuals happening during the fights because Sphere serves as a huge backdrop to the action happening in the octagon. Unlike the typical UFC pay-per-view card where the octagon is the only thing taking center stage, the actual venue in the background is going to get plenty of attention.

UFC 306 promises to be a much different experience but figuring out how it would all come together fell on the UFC’s production team along with ESPN to ensure the live and televised experiences work hand in hand.

“This is why Dana is so brilliant,” Jacobs said about the UFC CEO. “Dana set the bar super high and now everyone involved from the UFC side and from our side, again this is where Craig Borsari has lived for months and that’s why he built this creative team of Avengers — he has people on his team who worked on the Taylor Swift tour working on this event. He has to figure out to live up to the standard that Dana set and we’re playing in the exact same world with the exact same agenda.”

Perhaps the toughest challenge required at ESPN is figuring out how this entire show comes across to the audience watching at home because there’s far more of them than the people who can actually attend the event.

Jacobs admitted that was quite possibly the most daunting task at all because it’s one thing to pull of an awe-inspiring live show but how exactly does that work for the people watching at home?

“What you’re getting at remains one of the single biggest challenges in this,” Jacobs said. “Because you are essentially serving two different audiences. There’s the audience in Sphere and looks around and your head’s on a swivel. It is truly a technological marvel. You are in it and it’s sort of overwhelming how cool it is and the ingenuity and the creative technology behind it. That’s one thing.

“What about the fan at home that has to experience it through the 16x9 box on their wall or their computer screen or their phone? What is that experience like? I cannot say enough the work that Craig and [UFC senior vice president and coordinating producer] Zach [Candito] [have done] — this event would have been hard enough if they had been doing nothing else for the last six months. Instead they’ve done major pay-per-views from Australia, Abu Dhabi, Fight Nights almost every week, Contender Series kicked off in this window. It’s not like they’ve done nothing but this. But they’re still trying to pull this off.”

The UFC raising the bar to undertake a mission like putting on a show at Sphere then required ESPN to follow suit as the promotion’s broadcast partner. While ESPN constantly advertises for upcoming UFC shows, particularly where pay-per-views are concerned, the upcoming card in Las Vegas was different.

White has built this show up so much that anything less than a spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime experience for the ages would almost be a disappointment. That’s exactly the mindset that ESPN executives tackled when laying out the network’s plans for UFC 306.

“We’ve challenged ourselves,” Matt Kenny, ESPN Vice President of Programming and Acquisitions told MMA Fighting. “Where we know how much the UFC has put into it. We like to joke we don’t know the half of what’s going into actually making this happen but we know how big it is. Fans are smart. They know and I think a lot of times when it comes to pay-per-view, you can talk about an event and try to drum up interest but there has to be genuine heat. There has to be genuine interest amongst fans. Clearly that’s the case here.

“The beauty of this event is it has crossover appeal because of the venue. Because of the storyline. Because Dana’s out there setting the bar so high. I think there’s a natural curiosity factor. Fans want to be a part of it.”

It’s not very often when an arena is getting just as much attention as the fights but that’s exactly what’s happening with UFC 306 at Sphere.

Jacobs believes that curiosity factor is actually going to draw in an even bigger audience than the typical UFC pay-per-view and perhaps even match the interest drawn when superstars like Conor McGregor make an appearance.

“Sphere is essentially a character here. In some ways, Sphere is the character,” Jacobs said. “So what you’re going to see from us from our first show on Thursday, we usually only have one set at a UFC event — we’re going to have one set, that’s our normal set at Sphere and then we have a whole second location set up on a rooftop a few blocks away from there where you see Sphere in the background. We have a drone. We have Gilbert Melendez and Dominick Cruz on site to really discuss what it means to have a Mexican style of fighting. We have Teddy Atlas on site to break down on why Sean O’Malley is such a dangerous striker in addition to the usual Chael [Sonnen] and Anthony [Smith].

“This is by far the biggest event coverage of the year and that’s including [UFC] 300, which is really saying something and we’ll stand up against even the biggest Conor [McGregor] fights we’ve had during the ESPN contract.”

From the opening fight of the night through the main event, UFC 306 has a lot of promises to deliver on but can this show possibly live up to expectations?

“Dana aspires to deliver fans these ‘oh shit’ moments,” Kenny said. “Even leading into it, I think there’s going to be no shortage of these ‘oh shit’ moments, leading up to, through and after the event.”