What Would It Take to Make You Buy a WEC PPV?

With the news that the most popular fighter in World Extreme Cagefighting, Urijah Faber, will get another shot at the featherweight title in a fight with Jose Aldo in the next few months, there's speculation that Faber vs. Aldo could be the main event in the WEC's first-ever pay-per-view card.

WEC General Manager Reed Harris fueled that speculation on Sunday night.

"I would think that as we move towards that, that would be a great pay-per-view," Harris said. "I think the fans would pay to see that fight. ... The other thing we have to look at though is we need to do more than one good fight on that card. We want to put together a card where people are basically saying they cannot miss it. ... I'm going to tell you it's going to happen. We're looking at the first half of 2010. We're looking at dates, locations, all that. There's a lot of things that we look at that go into this, and we want to make sure that our first one is very, very successful."

In combat sports, the real money comes from pay-per-view, and that's why every boxing and MMA promoter wants to put his fights on pay-per-vew. But is it realistic to think a WEC card could convince fans to shell out their hard-earned money?

I think Harris is right that it would have to be really, really stacked. It would probably have to include not just Faber vs. Aldo, but also a bantamweight title fight. The WEC's bantamweight title will be on the line March 6, when champion Brian Bowles fights Dominick Cruz. On the undercard that night, former champ Miguel Torres will take on Joseph Benavidez. The ideal situation for the WEC is that Bowles and Torres both win, setting up a rematch between them for the title, and that they're both healthy enough to fight again quickly.

So maybe we make Bowles-Torres 2 the co-main event on this hypothetical WEC pay-per-view card. And we probably need to stack the rest of the card as well -- but not so much that we don't leave any decent fights for the WEC's regular Versus cards. Maybe this is what a five-fight WEC pay-per-view card might look like:

Jose Aldo vs. Urijah Faber
Brian Bowles vs. Miguel Torres
Mike Brown vs. Manny Gamburyan
Anthony Njokuani vs. Kamal Shalorus
Leonard Garcia vs. Josh Grispi

Is that fight worthy of pay-per-view? In my mind, absolutely. But I don't know if there are enough people who agree with me to make a WEC card on pay-per-view a viable option. So you tell me: What would it take to make you buy a WEC card on pay-per-view?