The last and in my opinion best event of the month is getting closer with this weekends WEC event. Here is Zuffa head honcho Dana White and USA Today’s MMA columnist Sergio Non talking about WEC 48, the future of the WEC Lightweight division and the recent debacle last weekend in Nashville at the last Strikeforce event. Link to full article.

UFC, with five weight classes, had 13 pay-per-views last year. What gives you confidence that WEC eventually can match the ratio that UFC is doing right now with pay-per-views?

There’s great fights in the WEC. Anybody that’s ever watched these guys fight on Versus knows how these guys always perform. If we did three WEC pay-per-views a year, I think people are going to be interested in buying them.

You’ve got a lightweight title fight on the card. What’s the advantage to having an overlap at 155 between WEC and UFC?

I actually think it’s kind of cool. I think eventually what we do is, we’re going to continue to add to lighter weights, and you’ll end up seeing these (WEC) guys go into the UFC, the 155 pounders.

So once you add flyweight or divisions like that, you can move WEC’s lightweights and move them into UFC, is what you’re saying?

Yup.

While talk of the flyweight division is always nice, it does come through bittersweet since the talks of adding the 125lb weight class has been hinted at for almost a year. The talks of absorbing the WEC’s lightweights sounds promising but could end up being problematic with the 155lb division already being the biggest weight class in the UFC as it is.

With Zuffa taking the slow and steady route towards building the WEC brand. I still believe they would be better off going with the strategy I suggested in an earlier post and just add the lighter weight classes to the UFC and keep the WEC around as their very own farm/minor league promotion for up and comers and over the hill stars they don’t want other promotions to snatch up. This idea has been mentioned by many other blogs and rings of commons sense but time will tell if the advice will be taken into consideration.

The biggest and most important question was never touched upon in the interview. What is Zuffa going to do if PPV is not a viable option for the WEC? We can only wait until after this weekend to get a definitive answer.