Friday, The Ultimate Fighter will return for a 15th season.
The reality program has made changes and variations throughout its tenure. Before Season 4, losing fighters had to abdicate the house and were no longer allowed to train with their team. The ninth season implemented wild cards, chosen by the judges, to fight for the last quarterfinal spot.
However, the 15th season will institute more changes than ever before. The show is moving to Friday nights; the show is now broadcast on FX for the first time. Most importantly, the fights each week will be broadcast live.
Live fights will present another vicissitude: the overall production schedule will grow from six weeks to 12 weeks. This adjustment in the formula will only help the fighters and contestants of this year’s The Ultimate Fighter.
With the production schedule expanding, so will the length of time the fighters train. This will be extremely positive for the contestants. The Ultimate Fighter is a competition featuring many young, inexperienced fighters as well as some more veteran fighters who have never broken in with the world’s top promotion.
The best asset available to them is training under top-flight coaches. Now, The Ultimate Fighter coaches do not always end up being “world class.” Some have proven to be better coaches than others. They are UFC fighters after all, not professional coaches.
However, they often bring their own trainers and camps along, so the training ends up being very valuable regardless. Urijah Faber and Dominick Cruz also seem like two great candidates to be coaches. They both will take their roles seriously.
The competition amongst the contestants of The Ultimate Fighter is fierce. All of them have the same goal of becoming The Ultimate Fighter and joining the UFC. Since they all have the same goal, they make for ideal training partners.
Each competitor pushes the others to get better during the duration of their training. Now, their training will be twice as long. That’s twice as long they get to build a chemistry with their teams in training. It is also twice as long to push each other and get better together.
Last season, The Ultimate Fighter taped for six weeks and hosted 12 fights after the preliminary round of fights. So, once the fighters were in the house and began training with their teams, there were 12 fights before the finale.
That means that there was a fight at least once every three-and-a-half days. That is very little time for a fighter to prepare for his opponent. There is very little time to game plan for a specific opponent.
Now, the fighters will have double the time to train specifically for their designated challenger. This can only aide each fighter. The more time each opponent has to focus on his specific fight and receive personal attention from his coaches for his upcoming fight, the cleaner and more real the fights will be.
There are some potential problems brought on by the 12-week schedule. Although some may relish the extended schedule and treat all the time like the gift it is, some may begin to get lazy, especially if they have already been eliminated from the competition. This would drop the overall effectiveness of training.
Another problem is the expanded schedule will make it difficult for each fighter to maintain weight. The fighter who wins the first fight to reach the quarterfinals will have a long wait (get it? A long “wait” to maintain his “weight”…eh? eh?) before he will fight again. It will be even more difficult for him to maintain his weight and be in fighting shape for his second match-up.
The extended schedule may also cause more nagging injuries which arise from training. There is a greater chance that a competitor could be severely injured and forced to withdraw from the competition. This would be a great detriment, one that possibly could have been avoided with a six-week schedule.
Due to the 12-week schedule, coaches Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber will need to begin their training camps during taping. This will be a strange dynamic and it will be interesting to see how it affects the competitors.
Finally, The Ultimate Fighter contestants will have to be in the house for twice as long. This will require an incredible amount of mental fortitude from each of them. That is a long time to be away from their families.
Perhaps, more importantly, it is a long time for them to solely be around each other. In the past, personalities have mashed and worn on each other. This will certainly be the case this season with the increased exposure to each other.
There are certainly some negatives associated with the new 12-week schedule of The Ultimate Fighter. However, the potential benefits to the competitors outweigh those negatives. This is an opportunity for the fighters to reach their ultimate goal: fighting in the UFC.
The 12-week schedule will allow them to focus on attaining that goal for a longer period of time, with world-class coaches and training partners as motivated as themselves. This experience is invaluable. It cannot be replaced. As long as each fighter perseveres through the long schedule, the experience will help their career.
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