Why Your Local B-Dubs Probably ISN’T SHOWING The Big Fight This Weekend

picthx Chris Farina/top rank

Buffalo Wild Wings is one of the biggest sports bar chains in the country and usually shows all the sports you can handle, but even with its size, it’s likely that your local BWW won’t be showing the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight this weekend.

Bloomberg said that of the 1,080 Buffalo Wild Wing Restaurants in the US, about 70 will be showing the biggest fight of our generation. That’s only about 7 percent of its restaurants around the country.

The reason, of course, is money. The cost of broadcasting the fight at only one location is about $5,100. Multiply that by the 1,080 stores, that means BWW would have to dish out about $5.5 million dollars to broadcast the fight across the country. To show it at the current 70 stores, it’ll only cost them less than half a million ($357,000), but that’s at the discretion of the store owners.

Those locations that are showing the fight will be charging $20 per head. Let’s say it holds about 250 people, that means they’d be able to make back their money at about $5,000 per restaurant, but I guess breaking even isn’t good enough for B-Dubs, who has been struggling in sales lately, even raising wing prices late last year.

Their site does have a map of locations that are showing the fight, but it’s not easy. We only found nine spots in Southern California and all of them were pretty distant from each other.

The B-Dubs that recently opened in the Philippines will show the fight, though, and they’ll surely all be rooting for their hometown hero, Manny Pacquiao. So at least Filipinos will have an alternative spot to watch the $99.99 Pay-Per-View fight.

So you might be able to watch the MLB games, and even the NHL playoff games at Buffalo Wild Wings this weekend, but don’t expect to drive over and watch two of the best fighters of our era go at it.