One of the challenges for Strikeforce, M-1 Global, Affliction and anyone else who wants to promote Fedor Emelianenko is that the UFC owns the video rights to all of Fedor's fights in Pride, where he went 14-0 and established himself as the best fighter in MMA. That means it's awfully difficult to put together a commercial advertising a Fedor fight: There just isn't much footage that can be used.
But as the video above shows, the same can't be said about Fedor's Nov. 7 opponent Brett Rogers.
Rogers has fought twice for Strikeforce and three times for EliteXC (whose video library is now owned by Strikeforce), and he won all of those fights in highlight-reel fashion, and that means there are plenty of shots of Rogers beating people up that Strikeforce and CBS can use to promote the Nov. 7 fight.
And so we get this video promoting Fedor vs. Rogers, and it's a pretty good one. I would have liked to see more -- we still only get a few seconds of footage -- but it still conveys the basic message that CBS and Strikeforce want you to get: This is a big, tough guy who's going to give Fedor all he can handle. (It's a nice little bonus that they get to use footage of Rogers talking trash with Kimbo Slice.)
Overall, CBS and Strikeforce have a very difficult task ahead of them because most CBS viewers don't know either Fedor or Rogers. But with nine days to go before the fight, CBS is doing a fairly good job of changing that.