UFC Turns 30: Craig Borsari Looks Back at Three Decades of Production Innovation Inside the Octagon By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. Thursday, November 16, 2023 - 2:52 pm
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This week marks the 30th anniversary of the UFC and, for Craig Borsari and his production and operations teams, what a wild ride its been.
On Nov. 12, 1993, the fledgling, no-holds-barred Ultimate Fighting Championship debuted with UFC 1 at the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver and what would transpire over the next three decades has been nothing short of transcendent. Today, the multibillion-dollar MMA promotion produces and delivers more than 40 live events per year to more than a billion TV households in over 165 countries and territories in partnership 60+ global broadcast partners.
A youthful Craig Borsari, UFC Chief Content Officer and Executive Producer, with commentator Joe Rogan backstage at UFC 142: Aldo vs. Mendes I at HSBC Arena in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on Jan. 14, 2012.
On UFC's 30th birthday, SVG sat down with Borsari, who has been with UFC since 2005 and now serves as Chief Content Officer and Executive Producer, to take a look back at how the organization's production prowess has grown by leaps and bounds during his time there, as well as key milestones and memories along the way.
What did UFC's broadcast operations look like when you first started at the company?
When I started in 2005, it was vastly different and we had far fewer events on the calendar back then. In terms of the production complement, it was very scaled down. We had a single mobile unit and a lot less cameras and EVS [replay systems]. It was just a simple eight-camera execution with a very simple graphics package, and a lot less ancillary programming compared to the robust offering we have today. There was one full-time employee in the production department before I started and the rest of the team were freelance.
So what was the first UFC event you ever worked?
Everybody around here at the UFC always remembers their first event as an employee and mine was UFC 55 in 2005 at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut. My head was definitely spinning for the first couple of years just trying to get a handle on everything.
And what was the first event where you realized that UFC had truly made it as a top-tier sports organization?
That's a great question - I would have to say UFC 68 in 2007. That is when I really took a step back and said, wow, the sky is the limit for this sport and this organization.' That was Randy Couture versus Tim Sylvia [at the Nationwide Arena] in Columbus, Ohio. And I just remember the crowd roar and reaction to that fight was something that I had never heard before; it was just electric in the building. That night, I knew without question that there was a tremendous future for this sport and this brand.
Can you describe what UFC's production facilities and staff looked like when you first arrived?
Our main office on Sahara Drive back in the day was a 20,000 sq.-ft. building and was pretty limited in terms of [production facilities]. We had five or six edit systems and a tiny little 30 20 sq.-ft. studio to shoot some very simple one-person interviews and short segments. And that was it. We were there all the way up to 2016, when we moved into our new building, which was 185,000 sq. ft. And then we took on an adjacent building a few years after that that added another 135,000 square feet, which is now UFC Apex. As we were growing in those early days, we were outsourcing a ton of our production for original programming because we just didn't have the staff or the facilities back then to handle any of that.
And when did things begin to change and you started to bring production back in house?
Around the beginning of the Fox Sports era, we started to staff up with full-time employees. We also started to bring all of that programming that we had outsourced - our countdown shows, fighter profiles, documentaries - back in-house because we had the staff and the facilities to it. And then, when we opened the UFC APEX facility and the broadcast operations center, we were able to create pretty much any content that we could imagine. So to go from when I started - where we were lucky if we could execute a sameday 30-second promo in-house - to having 80 full-time employees in our production department and a state-of-the-art production facility has been a drastic change to say the least.
The state-of-the art UFC Apex facility opened in 2019.
In 2011, UFC took a big step forward in signing a rights deal with Fox Sports. How did that change your team's role and what was it like working with the Fox Sports folks?
The Fox deal was an incredibly exciting era for me because before coming to the UFC in 2005, I was working at Fox Sports. So it was a bit of a homecoming for me and I got to work with a lot of my friends and colleagues from the past. But more importantly, it was proof that UFC was really growing up - and growing up very quickly. We were finally going to be on a broadcast network with Fox in addition to being on their cable networks. I think it was during that period of time that we really started to play in the same space that all of the other major stick-and-ball sports were playing in. It was a bit of validation for those of us that been along on for the ride up until then and had had belief in the UFC for a long time. It showed that as a sport, as a brand, and as a company, we were ready to play at the highest level in sports media.
The UFC TONIGHT studio show was a fixture of Fox Sports' coverage during its rights deal.
Then in 2019, UFC kicked off an even bigger deal with ESPN - how did that impact broadcast operations and what has that partnership been like over the past few years?
I think the ESPN
