White is the face of the company. Even though most of the MMA-only fans I know of have no idea that Dana has taken pages out of Vince McMahon's book ad nauseum. From the economic model to the television and pay-per-view schemes to using his own face to make the brand the key selling point instead of the competitors it features, he's done right well with it. Does it work? Yeah. Does it sell tickets and generate PPV buyrates? Does Dana being plastered all over everything annoy the shit out of me? Oh yeah.
Now even though I like TUF, it helps to combine the worst elements of The Real World with a sport infested with meathead bro's who act like goddamn fools. They were onto something when they ripped off 24/7 to hype the Penn/St. Pierre fight. That is the kind of show I'd like to see more of. Who the fighter really is in his every day life. Not what he does when he's confined to a house with nothing to do but train and go up the wall so that the cameras can be there to lap up the table scraps and generate more negative looks at these guys.
He's also adopted some stupid shit that I don't find very cool...or productive. For instance, they still use the same stupid gladiator intro package to hype each fight. For someone trying to get the sport legalized in New York while simultaneously shaking off the barbaric, backwoods stigma that MMA has wrought (thanks, SEG!), he caters to it with dumb shit like this. Not to mention that they still use horrible nu-metal garbage as the theme song for the pay-per-views and for TUF. If Dana stopped and thought about some of these things like that, he'd be shoring up a boatload of issues that will frankly keep him from taking the sport to the legitimate mainstream like the NFL, MLB, NBA, or even boxing.
