Is the growth of mixed martial arts the top breakout sports story of this decade?
The new millennium has seen a host of such breakout stories – Tom Brady's Super Bowl conquests, the small-market Tampa Bay Rays' run to the World Series, the emergence of non-BCS football powerhouses – and USA Today is asking readers to vote on the biggest since 2000.
MMA going mainstream had earned 53 percent of the vote, and none of the other nine picks had earned more than 11 percent as of Friday morning.
We actually posed the question about MMA being mainstream in a recent MMAjunkie.com/"Inside MMA" poll. A third of voters think MMA is already a mainstream success, and 86 percent think it is or will be in the next few years.
Perhaps most telling is that 93 percent of voters believe the sport will be mainstream – like MLB, the NFL and NBA – at some point in the future. (Of course, those numbers don't represent the general population since voters are obviously MMA fans.)
USA Today, though, took the question a step further and now compares MMA's breakout success to the conquests of the decade's other top sports breakout stars. So far, MMA is putting up a hell of a fight.
To see the full list of picks and to cast a vote, go to USAToday.com.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/decade-breakouts.htm
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