The decline of The Ultimate Fighter as a talent pool
In 2005 when the Ultimate Fighting Championships debuted The Ultimate Fighter, a reality show which featured up-and-coming mixed martial artists living together and competing in an MMA tournament, it couldn’t
have hit a bigger jackpot for both providing itself with much needed exposure and also bringing up a crop of new fighters for their organisation.
Not only did the show achieve great ratings, with a fantastic fight closing out the season finale, but the fighters who showed up became some of the UFC’s most successful and recognisable fighters. Season
one light heavyweight winner Forrest Griffin has gone on to have a storied career, including capturing the light heavyweight title. The season one middleweight winner Diego Sanchez challenged for the lightweight title, and the man he beat in the final, Kenny
Florian, challenged twice. Season two winner Rashad Evans captured the belt from Griffin, and season four winner Matt Serra knocked out Georges St-Pierre in a shocking upset to win the welterweight title.
It’s not only winners who’ve done well, as two fighters from the earlier seasons of the show currently have title shots lined up despite not having won the tournament. Moreover most of these fighters were
relative no-names before they made it big, so TUF was an important vehicle for bringing these fighters into the spotlight.
But since then it’s been considerably bleaker. The issue was rammed home on Wednesday, when both the season eight lightweight winner and season nine lightweight winners featured on Ultimate Fight Night 22,
one of the free shows the UFC puts on often as a showcase for TUF winners. Ross Pearson, from season nine, was knocked down by Cole Miller in the second round and then choked out. Miller wasn’t even one of the top lightweights in the division.
His season eight counterpart Efrain Escudero came in as a favourite against Charles Oliveira, a Brazilian prospect and a fairly unknown quantity. He didn’t do much better than Pearson, lasting until the third
round until he, like Pearson, was choked out. Neither of these men are anywhere near to a title shot and could one day be fighting for their UFC jobs. Mac Danzig, another lightweight winner has barely managed to stay with the promotion.
So with season 12 of TUF having just kicked off Wednesday night, being broadcast immediately after viewers saw Pearson and Escudero getting choked out, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for the show to return
to its old glory days of producing top quality talent. The only truly top-flight fighter to have won the show recently is Roy Nelson for season 10, but he was already essentially a very well-known fighter before the show, and he breezed through a weak field.
So why has the show gone from being a reliable showcase for exciting prospects that will dominate the UFC for years to come, to being a show that at best will produce a couple of mid-level fighters?
Some of that might just be luck. But there’s another element at play. Back when the show debuted in 2005, the MMA scene in North America was exponentially smaller than it is today. Back then, fighters, even
good fighters, had to struggle for small pay days and claw tooth-and-nail to gain any exposure, and so appearing on a reality show, even one where the fighters were unpaid, was worth it for the contract they could win.
Nowadays though the scene is much bigger, and there’s a plethora of different fighting organisations where up-and-coming fighters can earn a reasonable pay cheque. The UFC also has a much better scouting
system, so these fighters get picked up directly from other promotions. In other words, there’s much less incentive to enter an unpaid competition when you can simply fight your way in and get paid while doing so.
There will be exceptions, and there will be good fighters to come out of TUF in future seasons. But the days of producing fighters like Griffin, Florian, Sanchez, Evans, Gray Maynard, Josh Koscheck and Mike
Swick are gone, and probably won’t be coming back.
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