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Strikeforce held an open workout and press conference yesterday at Legends gym in Hollywood, California for their upcoming Strikeforce “Nashville” event. Here’s highlights, video interviews and pictures courtesy of Strikeforce, Showtime, Sherdog and FIGHT! Magazine.

The CBS Saturday Night Fights ratings are in, but we don’t know yet if they were good enough to convince CBS to give Strikeforce and potentially Fedor Emelianenko another shot on their network.

Fox Fight Game’s Mike Straka talks to Scott Smith about his upcoming fight against Cung Le and gets Kelly Kahl’s immediate reaction to the event.

Where have we seen this image before?

The 11-11:30PM numbers from the actual Fedor-Rogers fight aren’t out yet (which should improve the numbers below), but the overnight ratings for the 9PM-11PM scheduled broadcast slot are. Strikeforce “Fedor vs. Rogers” averaged 3.79 million viewers during that time period and a 1.7/5 ratings share in the adults 18-49 demo. Where the event shined was with males 18-34 and males 18-49 drawing ratings shares of 2.2/8 and 2.3/7, respectively. It beat out college football in both demos.

TV by the Numbers has the ratings notes from CBS.

Fast NTI’s for Saturday, November 7th:

CBS’s SATURDAY NIGHT FIGHTS aired 9:00-11:24PM. Fast NTI ratings are only available 9:00-11:00PM so CBS’s ratings will change when released Tuesday morning.

ABC (split national college football) had live event programming Saturday night. CBS and ABC ratings and all time period rankings are tentative and subject to change.

CBS SATURDAY NIGHT FIGHTS (S) was first in adults 18-49 (1.7/05), adults 18-34 (1.7/06), men 25-54 (2.4/07), men 18-49 (2.3/07), men 18-34 (2.2/08), tied for first in adults 25-54 (1.7/05 with both NBC and ABC) and third in both households (2.3/04) and viewers (3.79m).

Compared to the 9:00-11:00PM season-to-date averages (CRIMETIME SATURDAY and 48 HOURS MYSTERY), CBS SATURDAY NIGHT FIGHTS was up +31% in adults 18-49 (from 1.3/04), +113% in adults 18-34 (from 0.8/03), +100% in men 25-54 (from 1.2/03), +156% in men 18-49 (from 0.9/03), +267% in men 18-34 (from 0.6/02), even in adults 25-54, down -44% in households (from 4.1/08) and lost -2.33m viewers (from 6.12m, -38%).

CBS average from 9-11p vs. college football
M1834: 2.2 (#1 in the tp, 0.7 ahead of ABC’s prelim football number, the closest competitor.)
M1849: 2.3 (#1 in the tp, 0.3 ahead of ABC’s prelim football number.)
The M1834 rtg was #1 in the tp for all four half hours. At 9pm, the M1849 was a tenth behind ABC, but led the tp for the remaining half hours.

Without knowing CBS’ targets it’s difficult to say if they’ll consider this a success or not. They’re definitely not as big as the numbers Kimbo and Gina put up last year, but as Kelly Kahl told Fanhouse, the bar wasn’t very high to begin with and they’re pleased with the improvements in the younger male demographics over their typical Saturday night ratings. He says it’s too soon to say if it was enough to convince them to put on another event on their network though.

Somewhat disappointing numbers aside, I thought the show came off extremely well, much better than the EliteXC shows did last year. The fights were entertaining, with maybe the exception of Shields-Mayhem, and the production was good for the most part. It’s certainly something they can build off, but the question is, did Fedor do enough last night to captivate the casual audience who saw him fight for the first time? Since Rogers made him look human and Fedor didn’t decimate Rogers in the opening minutes of the fight, I wonder if Fedor fell short of the high expectations everyone sets when trying to introduce Fedor to a new audience. If CBS gives it another shot, it will definitely be interesting to see what kind of a draw he is in round two.

Image via CombatLifestyle.com

Update: Kelly Kahl gave MMA Weekly a few comments that could be interpreted as promising.

Kelly Kahl, Senior Executive Vice President of CBS Primetime, said the strong numbers in key demographics outweighed the decline in overall viewers.

“Typically, we tend to get an older audience on Saturday night,” he said. “We know MMA is probably not your cup of tea if you’re in an older demographic, so that’s hardly surprising.

“Demographics are the reason you put this sport on. You’re not putting this on to get a huge household number, you’re putting it on to try to tap into a younger audience, and it looks like we were successful doing that.”

The ratings for the complete broadcast will be released Tuesday.

“We’ll hope for the best and re-visit and see if we can’t come back around and get another one of these scheduled at some point,” said Kahl.

Cross your fingers.

Scott Coker and Kelly Kahl talk to Fanhouse’s Ariel Helwani about bring Strikeforce to CBS.

Business wise the event is doing very well. Scott Coker says they’ve sold 9,815 tickets to the event with only 871 left to sell. Meanwhile, Kelly Kahl says they’ve completely sold out their commercial ad inventory for the event and they did it faster than they did with EliteXC and Kimbo Slice. Both are strong indicators of a successful event, but ratings will certainly play a major factor when CBS sits down to decide their future in the sport after the dust settles. Hopefully, those follow suit.

One last thing, Scott Coker mentions in his interview above that the WAMMA heavyweight title will be on the line tomorrow night, but he was apparently mistaken. WAMMA weaseled their way into the event somehow, but the fight is a three-rounder and not for the title.

Kelly Kahl after the jump.

Not many people are giving Brett Rogers much of a chance against Fedor Emelianenko on Nov. 7. He has a puncher’s chance, sure, but not much else.

Well, we had a deal with Strikeforce for some time. When they did a deal with Showtime, CBS had a deal in place, as well, and we always kept the door open. We were just kind of waiting for the right place, right time and right talent. And once Fedor was signed, that certainly looked to us as a great way to jump back into MMA on network TV. And talking to our partners at Strikeforce and Showtime, we were able to put a fight together and we’re very excited to get back on the air…Certainly [promoting Fedor] is part of the plan and that’s what we’re going to work on almost immediately start doing. While Fedor is certainly the No. 1 heavyweight in the world, you know, we have to let non-MMA fans know who this guy is. He’s got a great look, he’s got a great story and we need to share that with people…Well, what we talked about the last couple of times was if we could improve our demographics on a Saturday night, which we did a great job of the last few fights, and then, you know, we have to sell commercials. So if we can sell commercials, if we can improve our demos then we would consider that a success. … We don’t have kind of the built-in media hot buttons that maybe we’ve had in the past, but like I said, we do have the world’s No. 1 heavyweight, who is an interesting and compelling story, and again, it’s up to us to let the people know who he is and what that story is. When we get that out there, we’ll get people there. Certainly in the MMA world, everyone knows who Fedor is and we’re excited to be giving a lot of these people their first chance to see him.

—CBS primetime programming head honcho Kelly Kahl talking to MMA Fanhouse about broadcasting Fedor’s Strikeforce debut on CBS.

Kahl brings up the biggest question coming out of yesterday’s big announcement. Can CBS promote Fedor effectively enough to turn the Nov. 7 show into a ratings success?

It won’t be an easy task. Fedor has certainly garnered more attention in the US in the past year than ever before, but he’s still relatively unknown to the casual audience. He doesn’t look like your typical fighter and doesn’t speak English to the press, and even if he did, he doesn’t exactly have a captivating personality.

CBS can still create a compelling story out of it though. “The small, pudgy Russian heavyweight takes on the giant, intimidating knockout artist. Oh and by the way, the emotionless Russian is the best fighter on the planet and he’s going to murder him. Don’t believe us, tune in on Nov. 7.” Okay, I’m not a marketing guy, and I’m sure they can come up with something much better, but you get the point. They have something to work with here. Plus, they’ll have weeks worth of NFL games to market it to the target demo.

It’s not a lost cause, but without Gina Carano on the card they definitely have their work cut out for them.

By the way, the Sears Centre in Chicago is all but official for the venue.