MORNING KOMBAT WITH LUKE THOMAS AND BRIAN CAMPBELL - Floyd Mayweather vs. Logan Paul: It's Happening

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Retired but undefeated boxer Floyd Mayweather announced on Instagram Sunday night he is set to have a boxing exhibition with YouTube bozo Logan Paul. While details are scarce, the event is set to take place on February 20th. No fight card, location or venue was announced. --------------------------------- 'Morning Kombat’ is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Bullhorn and wherever else you listen to podcasts.    For more Combat Sports coverage subscribe here: youtube.com/MorningKombat   Follow our hosts on Twitter: @BCampbellCBS, @lthomasnews, @MorningKombat    For Morning Kombat gear visit: store.sho.com   Follow our hosts on Instagram: @BrianCampbell, @lukethomasnews, @MorningKombat  To hear more from the CBS Sports Podcast Network, visit https://www.cbssports.com/podcasts/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You hear that? Ugh, paid. And done. That's the sound of bills being paid on time. But with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card, paying your bills could sound like this. Yes! Earn rewards for paying your bill in full and on time each month.

Rise to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. Hi everyone, my name is Luke Thomas. I am one half of the hosting duo of Morning Combat. Rise to rewards with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, everyone. My name is Luke Thomas. I am one half of the hosting duo of Morning Combat. That's this YouTube channel. That's the podcast. I have some breaking news that is funny, sad, funny again.

The state of things, no matter what your opinion, just the state of things. So why don't we get right to it. First things first, however, please hit that subscribe button. Th thumbs up on the video if you don't mind. Appreciate that. Plus, don't worry, we'll go into more detail tomorrow. Morning Combat is tomorrow, Monday at 11 a.m. Me, Brian Campbell, will get his reaction. We'll think about this a little bit more, but this is my instant reaction to the news that Floyd Mayweather, who is in retirement, but I guess not really, is going to be facing off with YouTube sensation and all-around idiot, Logan Paul. They're going to have a boxing exhibition match February 20th. It was announced on Floyd's Instagram page today, which is Sunday, the 6th of December here in 2020. Now, details are a little bit scarce.

We don't know what weight. We don't know what venue. Frankly, we don't even know what state. And understand, depending on where they go, the commission might have some issues with this. Although my hunch is they're going to take this to a place where, one, probably some fans could be in attendance. We'll get to that in just a second.

And then, two, where the commission is going to be relatively lenient about this. But it is not a fight. It is not a sanctioned fight, because Lord knows it would be impossible to get a fight like that sanctioned. It is an exhibition. Of course, we're coming off the heels of the Mike Tyson and Roy Jones exhibition that had done pretty well. Now, that company that was behind that was called Triller. The one behind this company is a fan experience platform called FanMio. Now, this is interesting. The pay-per-view has different prices depending on when you buy it. If you buy it before a certain time, it's $24.99. Sorry, for the first 1 million buys, it's $25. For the after 1 million, it's $39.99. And then it's $59.99 for buys on or after December 19th.

And if you buy the day of, it's $70. It probably will exceed a million buys, I should say, especially at a $25 price point. That is very low. You'll recall that the Tyson Jones pay-per-view was just 50. Most promoters who are putting on actual fights are usually somewhere around 65, 75. And if they're really marquee events like a Mayweather-McGregor or Mayweather-Pacquiao, they can be as high as 100. This will be high the later you go. But as you can see, they want to get in with a low price point,

two low price points, and then also before Christmas, even before New Year's, or really try to sort of bank as many of those buys as they can. That's actually a fairly interesting strategy. I don't know how well it will work, but it seems like a decent gamble and one worth paying attention to, because that's about the only thing worth paying attention to. Look, man, I'm not going to sit here and belabor the point, and Brian and I will go into this more into detail tomorrow. If you're Floyd, it's kind of amazing, right?

You fight the best fighters several generations in a row. You retire. You get out of retirement. Well, you sort of semi-retire, and you fight Conor McGregor, and you make a boatload of money for that, close to $300 million. You have an exhibition against Tenshin Nasakawa, and you make a boatload of money for that, close to $300 million. You have an exhibition against Tenshin Nasukawa,

and you butcher him. You got how much for that? I don't know, but probably significant royalties, I would imagine. And now he has gone from a high-level MMA fighter to smaller but high-level kickboxer, although Nasukawa has fought MMA as well, but predominantly kickboxing, to now just like fucko. That's like the level he's gone to is like dude who's relatively in

shape by average person standards who makes a living filming people who've killed themselves in Japanese forests and, you know, I don't know, what does he do? Eat bugs? I don't even know what he does really, but he is quite popular and this will probably do really well. So who is the audience for this? Well, it's probably going to be a couple of things, especially if you're buying it for $25. There are going to be people who watch this very ironically, like they're sort of in on the bit that it's kind of fun.

We also don't know who else might be on this card. I would imagine the other Paul brother will be here, but who the hell knows. So there's going to be people who might want to watch for the full experience, the sort of silliness of it all, the sort of in the middle of a Monty Python sketch kind of feel. There's that. The other part though is I've been trying to figure out like what the appeal of this is because, you know, I wouldn't, I'm probably going to have to watch it just for my job, but like it doesn't appeal to me. And this is actually a little bit different than the Jones and the Tyson thing because that was a little bit like old guy trying to show a little bit of athletic spirit.

And I'm sure that they will have some level of that between these two. But here's what occurs to me about this. This is like it's not quite sports and it's not quite pro wrestling. It's sort of something in between, right? Because there's no determined outcome. Excuse me, there is a determined outcome in the sense that nobody can win. So it's not really, the stakes are not the same as sport. It's not up in the air. It's not two elite athletes. It's nothing like that. It's much more circusy. But at the same time, it has this sort of imprimatur of athletic regulation, sanction, real athlete,

difference in size kind of a thing, right? So it plays on the margins of both the reality of sports and the theater and sort of circusy element of pro wrestling while actually neither, sorry, I should say being in neither camp, fully anyway. A little bit here, a little bit there. It's something of a bridge between them, which is why it will just depend on what your preferences are. If you like just raw sports, you're not really into the pro wrestling thing, this probably will not do much for you.

I put myself in that camp. On the other hand, there are people who like sports and pro wrestling, there are people who just like pro wrestling. So if you're a little bit more inclined towards that sort of circus-y kind of, I'm not too judgmental about the fact that it's not all that hardcore sport, I want to see a little fun, I want to see a little, you know, pomp and circumstance, this might be for you. How well these two will execute in the same way that Jones and Tyson were able to execute, your guess is as good as mine. So we don't have a whole lot. We have a date, February 20th. We have Floyd Mayweather. We have Logan Paul. We have a few price points depending on when you want to buy this. The company again,

Fan Mio, if you guys are interested in that. But we don't have a whole lot else. We don't have a fight card. We don't have an athletic commission. We don't have a state. We don't have a lot of things. So we'll have to see. But that is the news for now, February 20th.

It's going to get real weird, probably a little stupid, maybe a little fun, depending on one's perspective. But people took notice of the success from that Tyson versus Jones pay-per-view. And we said it before in Morning Combat, whether it's real fights that Bellator is putting on between older guys, or whether it's these exhibitions and boxing, and I suppose you could make real fights out of that case too, depending on the pair. There is a market for weird. There's a market for old dudes. There's a market for this YouTube kind of thing.

And you're getting it here. This is sort of a mix of all of it there. Not quite pro wrestling. Not quite sport. Something in the middle. All right. Like the video. Hit the subscribe button.

Plenty of talk about this. Plus UFC Vegas 16, Spence Garcia, and a whole lot more tomorrow on Morning Combat. For now, I'm Luke Thomas. Talk to you all then.