The Ultimate Fighter on Friday night drew the second-lowest audience in the history of the show, doing a 0.5 rating and 676,000 viewers.
The show, featuring a controversial decision in the Michael Hill vs. Matt Secor fight, was down 17 percent from the Oct. 19 show. The only major head-to-head event was a college football game on ESPN that did 2,028,000 viewers.
The only show in the series’ 16-year history that did lower numbers was the Oct. 12 show, which did a 0.49 rating and 624,000 viewers.
Hill, of Team Nelson, won an overtime decision over Secor that few watching agreed with and caused Dana White to be heavily critical of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, for what he believed to be the latest in a long line of bad decisions.
For the first time since Ultimate Fighter left Spike, the former home of UFC actually beat FX head-to-head as far as total viewers with 778,000 for a repeat of “Ink Master.” TUF did beat Inkmaster in the 18-49 demo.
Bellator, running the semifinals of its welterweight tournament with Lyman Good over Michail Tsarev and Andrey Korsehkov over Marius Zaromskis, did 154,000 viewers. That number was almost identical with the 149,000 the prior week and is slightly below the 163,000 viewers the show has averaged this season.