Dana White is strongly denying the Floyd Mayweather story to anyone who’ll listen. Not that his denials mean that its not going to happen–you’ll recall that he was denying the PRIDE purchase left and right pretty much up to the time he got on a plane bound for Tokyo. Also keep in mind that Dana says he has a ‘big announcement’ about as often as Hulk Hogan claims that he’s starting a new wrestling promotion with Eric Bishoff. The last ‘big announcement’ Dana had was that the UFC signed a deal with Yahoo to stream their PPVs online.

So all that’s *really* known at this point is that Dana claims he’s got an announcement forthcoming that will ‘rock the industry’. He also says that its such a big deal he’s rented out a venue to break the news to the Zuffa employees before it hits the media. Again, this may not actually be the case but assuming it is it implies that its a pretty big deal that would have a significant impact on the Zuffa staff.

The most obvious ‘big announcement’ is a network TV deal. Maybe Dana went on his hands and knees to HBO and worked out a deal with them. A deal with ESPN has also been mentioned which might be a bigger deal if only for the network’s position of influence among mainstream sports media and fans. It would be questionable if either of these would rise to the level of ‘rocking the industry’, nor would it seem that Zuffa staffers would need to have it make known to them before it goes public. Furthermore, the broadcast industry is horrible about keeping this kind of news under wraps.

Another scenario along these lines is a merger/purchase of the UFC by another entity–the names most often mentioned are Golden Boy Promotions and Fox TV. Maybe, but again this is a hard thing to keep under wraps and particularly from the Zuffa staffers who’d presumably at least know that negotiations are in the works. There’s speculation that a video game deal may be in the works–again, interesting but not earth shattering.

Other speculation has been of a potential Anderson Silva/Chuck Liddell match (again interesting, but not earth shattering), an Anderson Silva/GSP match (ditto) and a Silva/BJ Penn match (ditto again). There’s even been suggestions that Dana White might step down which would be a big deal, but not sure why he’d do so at this stage of the game with the competition in the MMA industry just heating up.