Tag: The Ultimate Fighter

‘TUF Nations’ Finale Results: 5 Key Takeaways from Quebec

The Ultimate Fighter: Nations had its finale on Wednesday night from Quebec City, and it was a decent night of exciting action.
Two new The Ultimate Fighter champions were crowned, Elias Theodorou and Chad Laprise, and coaches Patrick Cote and Kyle Nok…

The Ultimate Fighter: Nations had its finale on Wednesday night from Quebec City, and it was a decent night of exciting action.

Two new The Ultimate Fighter champions were crowned, Elias Theodorou and Chad Laprise, and coaches Patrick Cote and Kyle Noke battled in a season-ending duel in the co-main event.

Tim Kennedy bested Michael Bisping in a top-10 middleweight meeting in the main event to cap off the evening.

In total, the UFC gave us 13 fights on Wednesday. Not all were stellar, but most had some redeeming qualities.

The incredibly lengthy event kicked off a two-card fight week for the UFC and gave fans some midweek enjoyment. The card gave fans and pundits plenty to think about moving forward. Here are five takeaways from the finale.

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TUF Nations Finale: Recapping the Fight Night Bonuses

The Ultimate Fighter Nations Finale went down Wednesday night, and it was full of great fights and impressive finishes. It was a great surprise for fight fans, who did not hold the event in high regard coming into the night.
The event saw some signific…

The Ultimate Fighter Nations Finale went down Wednesday night, and it was full of great fights and impressive finishes. It was a great surprise for fight fans, who did not hold the event in high regard coming into the night.

The event saw some significant happenings. Two Canadian fighters were crowned the newest Ultimate Fighter champions in Elias Theodorou and Chad Laprise. Not only that, but after a fun, back-and-forth fight in the main event, Tim Kennedy took a unanimous decision over the favored Michael Bisping.

From this fight card, we got two Performance of the Night winners and two Fight of the Night winners. Let’s recap those bonuses and examine their legitimacy.

 

Performance of the Night No. 1: Ryan Jimmo

Canada’s Ryan Jimmo was the only home countryman to win a bonus Wednesday night. Boy, did he earn it, too.

Jimmo, taking on gritty, late-notice brawler Sean O’Connell, found himself in a fight early, as O’Connell stood in there with the karate champion and threw leather. O’Connell landed some good shots of his own, showing he was worthy of this UFC bout.

Then it happened.

O’Connell stood in the pocket and kept throwing heat at Jimmo. However, Jimmo caught the Utah native clean with a nasty shot square in the mug and dazed O’Connell badly. A couple follow-up shots and the American was out cold.

Jimmo showed that he has power and is not always a grinder. That nasty KO earned him a nice $50,000 bonus that he can now use to get dance lessons that will allow him to add more moves to his robot arsenal.

 

Performance of the Night No. 2: KJ Noons

If KJ Noons didn’t get a bonus tonight, the streets would have been filled with rioters demanding he get paid. Okay, maybe not that extreme, but it would have been erroneous.

Noons took on Sam Stout in a bout that was made a welterweight fight a few days out from fight night. Perhaps Noons used that lack of weight-cutting to eat something extra-extra, as he uncorked a monster of a punch that sent Stout into night-night land.

Stout doesn’t get knocked out. However, he did Wednesday night. He was so out of it that when he came to, he shot a takedown on the ref and tried putting him in a guillotine choke.

That’s how wicked the knockout was. Noons deserves every penny of that $50,000.

 

Fight of the Night: Dustin Poirier vs. Akira Corassani

Coming into Wednesday night, if you told me Dustin Poirier-Akira Corassani would have been the best fight of the night, I would have laughed in your face, spit in your beer and ridiculed you to tears.

Then, you would have returned the favor after watching Wednesday’s brawl between the two and proven me wrong.

Poirier and Corassani has a crazy, back-and-forth fight for the first five minutes. The Swede hurt the American and the American hurt the Swede.

Eventually, Poirier would finish Corassani in the second round, but the Swede gave him a fight. It was an awesome fight at that. 

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

TUF Nations Finale Results: Grades for Every Main Card Fighter

The Ultimate Fighter Nations concluded Wednesday evening in Quebec City, Canada. 
Featuring a main event between middleweight standouts Michael Bisping and Tim Kennedy, this fight card was much anticipated by fight fans and critics acros…

The Ultimate Fighter Nations concluded Wednesday evening in Quebec City, Canada. 

Featuring a main event between middleweight standouts Michael Bisping and Tim Kennedy, this fight card was much anticipated by fight fans and critics across the globe. These two main event fighters engaged in heated verbal battles before the fight, and one man proved his worth, effectively shutting up his foe inside the Octagon. 

In addition, The Ultimate Fighter Nations crowned two season champions, one at welterweight and one at middleweight. These two victors realized a lifelong dream to compete in the UFC, and the first stone on their new careers’ path was laid.

Making the main card even stronger, the season’s two coaches, Patrick Cote and Kyle Noke, squared off, with one man taking another step toward the top 10 of the welterweight division. 

Who impressed, and who failed to capitalize on the moment?

Click on to see the full grades for The Ultimate Fighter Nations Finale’s main card fighters.  

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TUF Nations Finale: Television and Providing a Payoff

Television is funny business. Not always “ha-ha” funny, either.
One can invest hours into a season of television, hoping that a payoff will come even if those hours are painstaking, boring or downright bad. You want to see a character rise above his de…

Television is funny business. Not always “ha-ha” funny, either.

One can invest hours into a season of television, hoping that a payoff will come even if those hours are painstaking, boring or downright bad. You want to see a character rise above his demons or get revenge, or another character get his comeuppance, and you’re willing to sit for hours in hopes that it happens.

Sometimes it does.

Other times it doesn’t.

But viewers keep coming back regardless, hanging on and waiting for it in one way or another.

That’s the concept that’s more or less driven the existence of The Ultimate Fighter, a program many claim to have stopped watching years ago, but that numbers suggest it may still have something of an audience.

The UFC is banking on that audience and their hunt for a reality MMA payoff, spinning off the program into all sorts of international variations in an effort to replicate the recipe for success that established its relevance a decade ago: A dash of violence, a pinch of in-house drama, a spoonful of hokey reality TV production and voila—instant credibility as a sport.

The very idea that this was the path to legitimizing MMA in North America is perhaps a sad commentary, but that’s an issue for another day.

What’s for today is the fact that the promotion has the season finale of its most recent international TUF happening on Wednesday night, and while viewership for the season has been among the worst of any of the program’s iterations, the finale is among the strongest those iterations have seen.

It’s almost directly inverse to the way TUF has existed in other markets, where the seasons do outlandish numbers episodically and then the campaign is capped by a collection of unknowns duking it out beneath a totally uninspiring headliner.

Not TUF: Nations though.

TUF: Nations is getting a solid headliner between Michael Bisping and Tim Kennedy. It’s getting a competitive, if perhaps irrelevant, bout between Canadian coach Patrick Cote and Aussie coach Kyle Noke. It’s got names like Sam Stout, Dustin Poirier, Sarah Kaufman and Mark Bocek.

In terms of payoff for the average MMA viewer, this is good for any free television card in the modern era of the UFC; for a regional Ultimate Fighter it borders on historic.

It’s hard to know what it all says about the importance of TUF, be it to the UFC or to its regional growth. It’s also hard to know what it says about the promotion’s commitment to providing payoff in the form of bigger names on free television, particularly on the brand of card that most would suggest has recently been the weakest.

Is the new goal to work backwards with TUF, improving finales in an effort to get fans to invest in the season knowing they’ll be rewarded with a good card at the end? Or is this just a matter of some names being available at a coincidental time, creating a good card by happenstance?

One way or another, the payoff is in place this time, whether it’s replicated in the future or not. It’s easy to get behind the UFC for that, for creating some prestige in the brand that essentially kickstarted their very existence as we know it.

That’s good for the sport, but more importantly it’s good for a viewer craving a payoff they’ve so habitually come to expect from television.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

TUF Nations Finale Weigh-in Results and Updates

The Ultimate Fighter: Nations will cap off the season with a quality fight card for fans.
The main event will be the conclusion to a rivalry built on social media between Michael Bisping and Tim Kennedy. Bisping is ranked No. 5 in the division, and Ken…

The Ultimate Fighter: Nations will cap off the season with a quality fight card for fans.

The main event will be the conclusion to a rivalry built on social media between Michael Bisping and Tim Kennedy. Bisping is ranked No. 5 in the division, and Kennedy comes in at No. 8. It is an important fight in the middleweight division.

In the co-main event, coaches Patrick Cote and Kyle Noke square off.

Eleven more bouts fill out the exciting Wednesday night card.

The Ultimate Fighter: Nations Weigh-In Results

  • Michael Bisping (186) vs. Tim Kennedy (186)
  • Patrick Cote (170) vs. Kyle Noke (171)
  • Sheldon Westcott (184) vs. Elias Theodorou (185)
  • Chad Laprise (170) vs. Olivier Aubin-Mercier (169)
  • Dustin Poirier (145) vs. Akira Corassani (145)
  • Sam Stout (169) vs. KJ Noons (168)
  • Sarah Kaufman (135) vs. Leslie Smith (135)
  • Ryan Jimmo (205) vs. Sean O’Connell (204)
  • George Roop (135) vs. Dustin Kimura (136)
  • Mark Bocek (156) vs. Mike de la Torre (156)
  • Nordine Taleb (185) vs. Vik Grujic (186)
  • Richard Walsh (171) vs. Chris Indich (170)
  • Mitch Gagnon (135) vs. Tim Gorman (135)

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

VIDEO: Wanderlei Silva and Chael Sonnen’s Hilarious and Awful TUF Brawl, In Its Entirety

The infamous “brawl” episode of TUF Brazil 3 finally aired yesterday, giving us a complete picture of what led up to Wanderlei Silva and Chael Sonnen tussling on the gym floor, and it’s honestly one of the funniest moments in TUF history. Silva instigates the situation by punching his palm and repeating the word “soon!” at Sonnen, like a schoolyard bully from a Disney movie. He spits at Sonnen’s feet, and I hate to make insulting comparisons here, but it’s the kind of thing that a llama or ape would do.

Chael remains as a cucumber, though: “How do you feel when you say crazy things like that to me, when I’ve been challenging you for years. You ever feel weird about that?”

At the 0:40 mark, I kid you not, Wanderlei says that Sonnen is going to have a daymare. Goodness, the English language offers so many possibilities for clever turns of phrase. But the best part is when Chael tries to grill Wandy on when exactly they’re going to fight. Of course, Wandy doesn’t have a clear answer for that. Then, Silva does some kind of slapping thing in front of Chael’s face, and the next time Silva closes distance on him, it’s on. Before you know it, Sonnen is on top of Silva, and Andre “Dida” Amade — who is an assistant coach on the show, not a competitor — is slugging Sonnen in the back of the head and ripping his jersey.

And that’s when this whole incident goes from comedy to tragedy. Sonnen called Dida’s behavior “straight-up illegal”, and he might have a point there. Just because you’re sucker-punched on a reality show doesn’t mean that normal assault rules don’t apply. Right? I have no idea, actually; I’ve never been on a Brazilian reality show. But I hear good things.

A few more important notes about this episode, via Wikipedia:

The infamous “brawl” episode of TUF Brazil 3 finally aired yesterday, giving us a complete picture of what led up to Wanderlei Silva and Chael Sonnen tussling on the gym floor, and it’s honestly one of the funniest moments in TUF history. Silva instigates the situation by punching his palm and repeating the word “soon!” at Sonnen, like a schoolyard bully from a Disney movie. He spits at Sonnen’s feet, and I hate to make insulting comparisons here, but it’s the kind of thing that a llama or ape would do.

Chael remains as a cucumber, though: “How do you feel when you say crazy things like that to me, when I’ve been challenging you for years. You ever feel weird about that?”

At the 0:40 mark, I kid you not, Wanderlei says that Sonnen is going to have a daymare. Goodness, the English language offers so many possibilities for clever turns of phrase. But the best part is when Chael tries to grill Wandy on when exactly they’re going to fight. Of course, Wandy doesn’t have a clear answer for that. Then, Silva does some kind of slapping thing in front of Chael’s face, and the next time Silva closes distance on him, it’s on. Before you know it, Sonnen is on top of Silva, and Andre “Dida” Amade — who is an assistant coach on the show, not a competitor — is slugging Sonnen in the back of the head and ripping his jersey.

And that’s when this whole incident goes from comedy to tragedy. Sonnen called Dida’s behavior “straight-up illegal”, and he might have a point there. Just because you’re sucker-punched on a reality show doesn’t mean that normal assault rules don’t apply. Right? I have no idea, actually; I’ve never been on a Brazilian reality show. But I hear good things.

A few more important notes about this episode, via Wikipedia:

– “The next heavyweight fight is supposed to be announced by Wanderlei, but he’s nowhere to be found. He finally arrives and the fight is revealed: Richardson Moreira vs. Job Kleber. Sonnen argues about Wanderlei’s excuses to be late and even mentions that he smells alcohol from his opponent.”

“Both teams participate in a challenge to write TUF: Brasil using a strings-based device that requires them to work together so the words are correctly written and approved by a professor. Team Sonnen finally ends their overall losing streak and Hortência announces that their team will participate in a pajamas party at the house while their opponents will be locked in a room as the party goes on.” [Ed. note: So, one team gets an all-dude pajama party, while the other has to play seven minutes in heaven?]

– “Gabrielle Garcia, a multi-time BJJ world champion, participates as a guest coach in Team Wanderlei’s training session.” [Ed. note: Obviously, this was filmed before her Clomiphene bust.]

– “…André Amade punches [Sonnen] in the back of the head and later brags about punching him and ripping his shirt off. Vinny Magalhães tells [Sonnen] that Amade was punching him, something that he didn’t notice. The entire team is perplexed with Amade’s attitude.”