The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) had previously mentioned tentative plans to move their annual Super Bowl weekend mega card out of Las Vegas, Nevada, for 2014, and now those plans are official.
For the first time in a decade, the annual early February event will shift from "Sin City" and instead take place in Newark, N.J., according to comments made by FOX Sports employee Jay Glazer at the UFC Fan Expo on Friday (July 5, 2013).
The unnamed fight card will take place at the Prudential Center in Newark on Feb. 1, 2014, and will coincide with Super Bowl XLVIII, which goes down on Feb. 2 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford.
With FOX Sports hosting the 2014 Super Bowl and the UFC clearly having a major working relationship with the network, the plan is for FOX to "own" the weekend by giving sports fans all they can handle across multiple platforms.
"We think that Super Bowl week in New York is going to be like anything else," Eric Shanks, President of Fox Sports Media Group, said on Nov. 2012. "We're gonna own the city, we're going to own that week of sports television and there's nothing better we can think of than a big fight that week. So, we're talking to Dana and Lorenzo about that. We'd love for that to happen. We'll see if they can put that together."
It is unknown at this time if the event will be broadcasted on big FOX, the upstart FOX Sports 1, or remain a pay-per-view (PPV) fight card.