As one of the UFC’s best color commentators, fans were left disappointed recently when Brian Stann announced that he would be leaving his job to take on a new role as the Chief Operating Officer of a large real estate firm, but it’s hard to argue with the logic behind his decision.
“I spent the entire (past) weekend with my kids, and I’ve been able to do that for several weekends in a row, which doesn’t typically happen for me, and that’s a big reason why this switch took place,” Stann told Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour show. “As you know, I love calling fights, and I loved being a sports analyst. I loved my time in college football and I loved my time calling fights in the UFC, and for a long time I thought, ‘hey, this is something I’m going to do for the next 15 to 20 years.’ The difficulty becomes, obviously, that you’re always working the weekends. Just for a stateside fight in the country, I would leave on Thursday, I wouldn’t come home until Sunday. If I was going out of the country, which I did a lot of international shows, I would leave on a Wednesday, I wouldn’t get home until Monday.
“I did 26 shows last year alone, that’s half the weekends. And even if I didn’t work a regular job — which I do — even if I didn’t work a regular job, that’s a lot of time to be away from my family. And as my girls get older, I mean, I’m missing soccer games, I can’t coach any of my kids’ teams. Eventually I’m going to start missing semis, homecoming, proms, things of that nature if this is my chosen career path.”
Stann also noted that there was no guarantee that he’d still have as prominent a role as both a UFC color commentator and FOX Sports analyst in the future due to there being no decisions yet on which network the promotion will be on when their TV rights go up for grabs next year.
On top of that, the former captain in the Marines still believes he has a lot more to offer beyond just providing color commentary.
“As much as I loved calling fights and I thought about my future, I’m not building anything, I’m not leading anything, and I just, I didn’t want that to be my career. When I look back at what I’ve done with the best years of my professional life, I didn’t want to just say, ‘Man, I called some really great fights.’ I wanted to do something a little bit more than that.”
In the end though, it seems it was very much a decision about putting his family first, and no-one can complain about that.
“As a parent, we all know, the best things with our families happen on weekends. And as much as I love this sport and I love the athletes, I love the coaches, I love calling fights — man, to sacrifice half the weekends a year away from my kids, I know at 50 years old I would’ve looked back on that, I would’ve regretted it bad.”
