I just finished watching the third episode of The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) Live on FX channel. The episode aired last Friday, March 23, 2012 in a one-hour time block. This season has been revolutionary for the series and for the UFC as a company.
The new season features live fights that air each week instead of previously taped contests like in seasons past. The UFC has also moved the show to the FX network as part of their seven-year television deal with the Fox family of networks, putting the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the sport of mixed martial arts in millions of living rooms each and every Friday night for the next several weeks.
This season has been one of the most entertaining in a long time. Coaches Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber are both champions of the sport and they know what it takes to make it at the UFC level. In 2007 Urijah Faber was the World Extreme Cagefighting 145-pound featherweight champion and Cruz was the young gun looking for a signature win to add to his resume.
Faber won their first contest with relative ease, but Dominick was a newcomer at that time, not quite ready for where the sport could take him.
Flash forward to 2011 and Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber met again at UFC 132, this time they were fighting for Cruz’s 135-pound UFC bantamweight championship. Cruz took the nod in a back and forth affair in their second bout. And now on July 7, 2012 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, Cruz and Faber will have their rubber match, a third chance to prove who is the better man.
Even though this season of TUF Live has been pretty epic, and even considering the knockouts in the first two in-house episodes of the show; this season is still missing something in its execution.
When I sat down this evening to finally watch last weeks’ episode I was disappointed by one glaring mistake that reared its ugly head for the second week in a row.
What was this mistake you ask?
Well, the mistake is that this show runs in a one-hour time block on FX and many people, like myself, must tape it on a DVR to watch later. The glitch is that the show is running about five to ten minutes over the one-hour time block. Therefore, I miss the announcement of the official winner and the next fight pick each week.
I have been a dedicated viewer of this show since season three and it is disheartening to miss an important part of each show due to a timing error. I hope this mistake is fixed soon. The network could simply add another 15 time slot onto the show and it would solve this issue.
Is anyone else out there experiencing this too? I just want to see the entire show and support the sport. Surely, FX will fix this minor problem soon and there will absolutely no complaints from this writer about the show in the future.
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