The Ultimate Fighter rebounded from its record low the week before, doing a 0.6 rating and 811,000 viewers for this past Friday night’s show.
The number was up 30 percent from the 624,000 viewers of the prior week. This week’s show also had strong baseball competition from the San Francisco Giants vs. St. Louis Cardinals game that pulled 7.11 million viewers. But even with the 30 percent increase in audience, it was still the third-lowest watched episode of the show in its 16-season history, beating only last week. The Sept. 28 episode did a 0.6 rating and 775,000 viewers, which was the record low before the Oct. 13 show.
Luckily, next week’s show won’t have the same level of competition since there is no Friday night World Series game.
The show featured a controversial judging decision with Colton Smith of Team Nelson winning over Eddy Ellis of Team Carwin in a match many thought was a draw and should have gone to an overtime round. The show was fourth in the Male 18-34 demo among all shows during the 10-11 p.m. hour on cable.
Bellator, offering an all-lightweight tournament show on Friday night, drew 149,000 viewers. It would be slightly ahead of the 145,000 on Oct. 5 which was the low mark of the current season. The show didn’t feature anything that would be expected to draw an out of the ordinary number. .It featured a main event of former UFC fighter Rich Clementi being the first person to beat Alexander “Tiger” Sarnavskiy, winning a decision that knocked the Russian’s record down to 20-1.
It would be down 15 percent from Oct. 13, but that show was headlined by a special fight with Eddie Alvarez, historically the company’s biggest ratings draw, against Patricky “Pitbull” Freire. The season average after four weeks is 165,000 viewers.