When I heard Scott Coker was coming back to start a new MMA promotion, I thought, “That’s cool, but… why?”
Since I’m very familiar with Scott’s background and the promotions he’s been a part of, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what he would come up with: tournaments and superfights.
So I refreshed my memory and started reading some old Scott Coker interviews. The first one I came across summed everything up almost perfectly:
We are not going to be that company that goes out and hires 100 people and grows haphazardly or be so top heavy that just can’t make money. We are going to grow the business organically and as needed. So far I am very happy with the business model that has been carried out. Hopefully our over 20 years of experience will kick-in during the times when we need it.
We would like to hearken back to the old PRIDE days when you used to see a lot of big fights in one night. Not just a headliner and four “okay” fights. That is what we want to get back to. When a fan can come in, pay as little as $30 to get into the stadium, and see five superstar fights. I think that everyone would like to see that.
You would think this was a quote from Scott Coker talking about Ki MMA, but it’s not.
This was Coker talking to Brian Oswald of MMAmania.com in 2009 about Strikeforce.
It’s only one interview, but there are plenty of others where he talks about PRIDE and even tournaments. So it’s no surprise that he landed on a tournament format, with regular bouts and superfights surrounding it, all inside a ring.
What is surprising is what they didn’t answer when they announced Ki MMA:
- Who is fighting?
- When are they fighting?
- Where are they fighting?
They didn’t announce a single fighter signing. In fact, they flat-out said they hadn’t signed anyone yet.
They’re also dancing around questions about TV and streaming distribution, so we still don’t have a clue where we’re supposed to watch it. They’ve said they want their first event to be in San Jose in Q1 2027, but there is nothing concrete yet.
I can’t help but wonder why they even held an event to announce Ki MMA in the first place.
Are they a little behind on their goals but confident enough in what’s in the works to proceed anyway?
The event featured a lot of legends and fighters Coker either helped build through Strikeforce or had good relationships with over the years. But it seemed less about what Ki has now and more about showing everyone what Scott has already done.
The message was basically, “Ki MMA is going to be good because look at what I’ve done before.”
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but none of those people are signed to Ki, and no fights involving any of them were announced.
Personally, I’m rooting for Ki.
I like the ring, and I was kind of surprised by how negative the fan reaction was to it. There was a lot of groaning about the ring and how that introduces too many resets. I guess wrestling against the cage and stalling is just more accepted these days.
I was also surprised by how many people flat-out don’t want another MMA promotion. A lot of that seems to come from UFC loyalists.
I don’t necessarily hate that take, either. The UFC is such a juggernaut. They have a massive roster with most of the best fighters in the world, along with their own feeder systems through The Ultimate Fighter, Dana White’s Contender Series, and Road to UFC. PFL also has a stable of fighters tied up, and then there’s RIZIN in Japan.
So who is going to fight for Ki?
All we really know right now is that they want featherweight prospects in their early 20s with roughly 10 fights. Then we, as fans, have to sit through what is supposed to be a year-long tournament across four different countries to find out whether we actually care about any of them.
Ki MMA wants to do better storytelling.
Well, they’re really, REALLY setting themselves up for a massive challenge.
The only hint of storytelling we’ve seen so far has been extremely bad AI videos of AI fighters doing AI MMA inside an AI ring.
And, as I said earlier, there still isn’t a distribution partner.
I’d grade the Ki MMA announcement event a C-. They failed to answer the biggest questions.
People inside the business would probably grade it much higher because it really seemed to function more as a networking event than a launch for fans. What sucks is that Ariel Helwani was there, arrived late, talked with a lot of people, and still did almost no boots-on-the-ground reporting.
The way he described it afterward made the whole thing sound like a high school reunion.
More than anything, though, Scott’s new promotion has me asking a bigger question.
What Is MMA Actually Missing?
When I look across the MMA landscape, is there really anything I’m still wanting?
I think about card quality. I think about past rivalries and how genuinely excited I used to get before certain fights. I think about the heavyweight division.
And I do think about storytelling.
I mentioned not long ago that I felt storytelling in MMA had really been lacking. I hadn’t heard many people talk about it again before Rich Chou brought it up during the Ki press event.
He didn’t go into much detail, but I found that interesting.
When I think about storytelling in MMA, I think about actually getting to know the fighters and finding what makes each of them interesting.
That can mean spending more time on pre-fight video packages and other content, but that only works if there’s something there to begin with. The harder part is finding fighters who have something interesting to say, an actual personality, or something about them that makes people want to keep watching.
If you’re not aware, it is extremely difficult to find a fighter who is actually interesting, has charisma, and isn’t just a carbon copy of the fighter to their left or right.
A lot of fighters love a structured, day-to-day routine, which is part of why Embedded became stale so quickly.
Before Embedded, there were the Dana White vlogs. They followed Dana around and captured his interactions with fighters. If Dana White brought those vlogs back in 2026, I think they would do tremendous numbers, and they would be extremely clippable.
So how can Ki MMA, Scott Coker, and Rich Chou deliver on their desire to improve storytelling?
Finding a fighter with that “it factor” right away is highly unlikely.
I’ll vomit if they do another Embedded-style series because practically every fight promotion with the resources to do it has already stolen that idea.
I think about RIZIN’s pre-fight video packages, which are phenomenal. Watching Shinya Aoki riding his bike around town, meeting fans, then complaining about it was great.
It’s just different enough to be interesting.
Sitting a fighter down and asking them stupid questions just to get stupid, generic answers back for a small video promo is almost always a waste of everyone’s time.
I’m not exactly sure how Ki can do it, but I think they need to do something with live streaming and/or vlog-style video formats. They tend to run longer, produce more natural interactions, and gives them plenty of material that can later be clipped into short-form content.
Scott Coker is on a quest to find a star, but I don’t think Coker himself necessarily has the charisma to lead a vlog or live stream.
Then again, maybe that could work in his favor.
Maybe they need someone else to be that face. Josh Barnett, or really anyone with enough personality to interact naturally with fighters, could take people backstage during fight nights.
They could also just take a camera backstage after fights, while fighters are doing their post-fight medicals, and let it roll. The UFC used to do that with the Dana White vlogs, too.
Some of the most amazing MMA content, in my opinion, comes from those interactions in the bowels of the arena after two fighters have just fought.
Those moments bring soul and the human element back into MMA.
That kind of human element feels especially important because, in my opinion, the UFC has increasingly moved in the opposite direction.
Since around 2016, it has focused more and more on getting a knockout and getting it quickly. It doesn’t matter if it’s two geeks off the street, as long as they throw down and someone gets a highlight-worthy finish.
That push for knockouts at all costs has, in my opinion, completely devalued the nuances of what it actually takes to be a skilled MMA fighter.
Look no further than DWCS.
I see waves of new fans tune in to bet, yell, scream, and praise two donks who will never touch gold in the UFC. But because they left it all in the cage and got out of there in under five minutes, it’s suddenly the best fight they’ve ever seen.
Fights that go to decision are now almost automatically assumed to be terrible fights.
I’d like to think that’s an insignificant portion of the fanbase, but I really don’t think it is.
Sure, they’ll probably stop watching MMA in three to five years, but there is always another crop of fair-weather fans ready to replace them.
Aside from all the bells and whistles, as Dana White likes to call them, one of the major issues I have with MMA today has to do with the rules and refereeing.
If Scott Coker could somehow separate Ki from other organizations through slightly different rules, and especially through how those rules are enforced, that could be massive.
I think about actual point deductions and yellow cards. I think about referees being more proactive about stopping stalling.
They could rethink how fights are scored. They could experiment with open scoring.
There’s a whole list of things they could potentially try, especially if they find an athletic commission that is open to it.
Scott Coker has a long history in California and likely has a good relationship with Andy Foster and the California State Athletic Commission.
In my opinion, slight modifications to the rules and the way fights are officiated could be what truly separates Ki MMA from the UFC and other MMA promotions.
Without something like that, though, we may unfortunately end up with a tournament-style MMA organization that’s difficult to follow, difficult to stay invested in, and surrounded by veteran-slop “super fights.”
The ring looks different. The tournament sounds different.
But at some point, Ki MMA still has to answer the most important question:
What are they actually going to do differently? I guess we’ll find out.
For now, here’s what we have.
