- Joined
- May 8, 2002
- Posts
- 1,196,384
- Reaction score
- 59
You must be registered for see images attach
Credit: Robert Deutsch-Imagn Images / Amber Searls-Imagn Images
Dan Hurley left the White House South Lawn on Sunday with one idea in mind: to put a basketball court where the Octagon was.
The UConn head coach was among the guests at UFC Freedom 250, the first professional sporting event ever held on the South Lawn, a seven-fight card on Paramount+ that coincided with President Trump’s 80th birthday and the 250th anniversary of American independence. When it was over, a TMZ reporter asked Hurley what sporting event should come next.
“That would be good, man,” Hurley told TMZ DC. “I think UConn should definitely be in it. Maybe UConn-Duke. Yeah, it’d be pretty cool. I’m definitely down.”
UConn and Duke met in the Elite Eight with the Huskies trailing by 19 points before Braylon Mullins hit a 35-foot buzzer-beater over Isaiah Evans to complete one of the more stunning comebacks in recent tournament memory and send UConn to the Final Four. The Huskies ultimately lost to Michigan in the national championship game in Indianapolis, but a rematch with Duke is already on the books — Amazon Prime Video has a neutral-site game between the two programs scheduled for Nov. 25 — and apparently, the South Lawn works just as well for Hurley.
The event Hurley attended had no business being on the South Lawn, at least according to a federal lawsuit that tried to stop it. The suit, filed by two Virginia residents, argued that Freedom 250 violated National Park Service rules banning sporting events on the South Lawn, accused the UFC and its broadcast partners of hiding a commercial enterprise behind a Semiquincentennial Commission exemption that was never designed to protect a for-profit event, and flagged Trump’s purchase of stock in UFC parent company TKO as a conflict of interest. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta cleared it to proceed, ruling that the plaintiffs failed to establish standing or irreparable harm, and citing the UFC’s $60 million investment as evidence that blocking the event would cause substantial damage of its own.
Dana White had been promising Super Bowl-type viewership numbers for the event, and spent months teasing the possibility of CBS carrying part of it on linear television. Per Sports Business Journal, that was never actually on the table. The card aired exclusively on Paramount+ and averaged 7 million U.S. viewers, with 17 million total tuning in across the U.S. and Latin America — the biggest exclusive live event in Paramount+ history — and nowhere near the Super Bowl, which averaged 124.9 million viewers this past February.
White said afterward that Freedom 250 was a one-time event, in part because the UFC projected a $30 million loss on the production. Whether a basketball court ever goes up on the South Lawn is entirely up to people above Hurley’s pay grade, but if Duke can end up playing in a baseball stadium over a broadcast rights dispute, the White House lawn isn’t the most outlandish venue on the board.
The post Dan Hurley pitches UConn-Duke game at White House after UFC Freedom 250 appeared first on Awful Announcing.
Continue reading...
