DREAM Still Scrambling; KID Yamamoto to DREAM.14

So the DREAM.14 scramble continues, this time they've pulled KID Yamamoto off of the upcoming Strikeforce show, with it looking like they will instead promote the upcoming DREAM.14 with Yamamoto featured on the card. MMAJunkie was in on the conference call with Strikeforce today;

Yamamoto was scheduled to take on Federico Lopez on the non-televised portion of "Heavy Artillery." However, Coker said the Japanese featherweight could help plug a talent gap at DREAM.14, an event which recently lost a planned 8-man light heavyweight tournament.

Coker said DREAM's promoters asked him to place Yamamoto on the May 15 card but changed their minds in the shake-up.

This paints things in a whole different light. If you don't regularly read Zach Arnold's FightOpinion, I recommend reading his piece on DREAM.14 falling apart. Arnold expounds on a lot of the points that I made earlier and provides some solid insight into what could be going on in Japan. This does not help strengthen DREAM's position in Japan one bit, as it proves how flimsy the tape holding together the television deal for DREAM really is at this point. After the problems they had in South Korea and now the problems in Japan, things are looking rather grim for DREAM. As Arnold points out, K-1's vision was always to dominate Japan's airwaves for combat sports, and up until December they were able to do that, strong-arming SRC out of their NYE show and "co-promoting" (notice the quotation marks) it with them. The bottom line was it was still a show put on by FEG/DREAM/K-1/Real Entertainment, not World Victory Road/SRC. 

If they cannot keep TBS happy, expect a major shake-up in the Japanese MMA world, but don't expect K-1 or K-1 MAX to go anywhere. I can't stress that enough, that the K-1 brand is still incredibly strong, while ratings are not stellar, they have held strong and there is still enough starpower in K-1 to keep everybody happy. With the -63kgs tournament coming up, there are a lot of young, talented and more-importantly (how sad is it to say that?) attractive Japanese fighters who could easily become breakout stars for K-1.