Watching the finale of The Contender on Tuesday night, I started thinking about boxing. This is unusual for me as I am not an avid boxing fan. But this seems to align me with the majority of the nation.

Boxing is on the verge of becoming irrelevant to the mainstream sports fan, and there are a couple of reasons why.

Since the retirement of Lennox Lewis more than two years ago, there has not been a dominant heavyweight for the nation to root for and more importantly, recognize.

Boxing needs a Yankees. It needs an Eastern women’s rugby team. It needs a Dream Team.

I’m talking about the team of MJ and Charles Barkley fame, not the current “Dream Team.” They lost to Greece in the semifinals of the World Championships. Yes, a team of Greeks beat D-Wade, LeBron, and Carmelo. Awful.

In fact, all sports need a team or an individual to always be the favorite.

Sports in general are better when teams everyone recognizes succeed, whether you love them or love to hate them.

If Tommy Zbikowski and the Notre Dame defense keep getting torched, then maybe Zibby will forget about football and become the Sosa-and-McGwire-home-run-chase of boxing and be the big name athlete and the perennial favorite that will resurrect the sport after a lull in interest.

His fight at Madison Square Garden, the first of his professional career, created a stir in the sporting world that boxing had not done in many years.

Boxing is also becoming an afterthought because of the increased interest in Ultimate Fighting Championship and other forms of mixed martial arts.

Many would-be boxing fans have succumbed to their video-game induced attention-deficit disorder and gore addiction and moved on to UFC.

While a referee in boxing will call the bout if a fighter looks like he can’t defend himself anymore, the octagon is not as friendly. A UFC fighter must be choked out, knocked out or forced to submit to a tap-out in order to get the win.

Head to Stix (yes I still call it Stix, too) during a Matt Hughes fight and you can see how popular the sport has become, especially on this campus since Hughes is an Eastern grad.

Boxing has always been considered a violent sport and talk to anyone that was pummeled by Mike Tyson and they will assure you that it is.

But, unbelievably, it is not violent enough.

Boxers often bounce around the ring and hug it out like Ari Gold after a few punches are thrown. The fans crowded into the Staples Center and booed Grady Brewer and Stevie Forbes because they wanted to see more action.

They wanted to see the blood and the takedowns that are so commonplace in UFC.

We are living in a UFC world these days, but maybe The Contender can do for Brewer and boxing what American Idol did for Kelly Clarkson and Ruben Studdard.

OK, maybe not Ruben.

But boxing should certainly be “Sorry for 2004” and all the other years it has let itself become a second-class sport to the general public.