Ultimate Fighter on Tuesday drew the second-highest viewership number of the season with a 1.0 rating and 1,303,000 viewers.
The show, featuring the wild-card fight where Bubba McDaniel of Team Jones defeated Kevin Casey of Team Sonnen when Casey couldn’t continue into the third round due to exhaustion in a fight that the judges had even after two rounds. McDaniel and Casey were two of the best-known fighters coming into the season, with McDaniel having worked for Bellator and Elite XC and Casey once having a fight with Matt Lindland on a Strikeforce show.
The show also did well in the key demographics, doing a 1.37 rating in Males 18-34 and a 1.25 in Males 18-49.
Next week’s show features the first two tournament quarterfinal matches with Collin Hart vs. Kelvin Gastelum and Dylan Andrews vs. Luke Barnatt. Ronda Rousey also makes a guest appearance on the show.
Bellator’s Thursday night show did 748,000 viewers, which is at normal levels for the series. The number should, if anything, be considered a positive because there were no marquee fighters on the show which was headlined by Dave Jansen’s unanimous decision win over Marcin Held in the finals of last season’s lightweight tournament. With the win, Jansen is in line for a shot at champion Michael Chandler.
The show went head-to-head with four NCAA college basketball tournament games on CBS, TNT, TBS, and Tru TV.
The replay of Bellator at midnight did 394,000 viewers, a little above normal levels.
Bellator has two tournament finals next week from Tampa, Fla., with the light heavyweight final of Emanuel Newton vs. Mikhail Zayats and the lightweight final between David Rickels vs. Saad Awad.