What’s Wrong with The Ultimate Fighter?

The Ultimate Fighter has played a pivotal role in the popularity rise of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The television show has produced a host of major stars and big money fights in the past three and a half years. However, the current season of the show has produced a feeling of general malaise.

Ratings are the lowest for any season. CB Dollaway is the only fighter on the season who appears to have star potential. But the most confounding development is the limited buzz for the fight between charismatic coaches Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Forrest Griffin.

When the season began, the choice of Jackson and Griffin as coaches was widely praised. Both are high level fighters with larger-than-life personalities. The feeling was their presence would increase ratings and lead to a very high pay-per-view buy rate for their championship fight.

In fact, tickets for their fight have sold slower than for the most recent Las Vegas event featuring B.J. Penn vs. Sean Sherk. It seems highly unlikely Griffin vs. Jackson will do UFC’s highest buy rate of the year as was once predicted. The question is thus why that fight hasn’t sparked the interest that was almost universally expected?

The answer to that question comes in the one key miscalculation the UFC made: the relationship between the coaches. As much as some would like to pretend otherwise, boxing and MMA have always been built around feuds and always will be. This doesn’t mean that you need to have fighters pretending to hate each other for every major event. However, it is hard to build a fight when there isn’t at least a sense of tension between the fighters.

Jackson and Griffin on The Ultimate Fighter don’t appear to have even a competitive rivalry, let alone a grudge. The Ortiz-Shamrock, Hughes-Serra and Penn-Pulver seasons of the show featured coaches who wanted to best the other at everything. Fans were left thinking, “If these guys want to beat each other so badly at bowling or ping pong, imagine how seriously they are taking their fight.” Jackson and Griffin have had the exact opposite effect. By joking their way through the show, fans are left thinking they don’t care as much about their fight as they actually do.

With UFC promising the most shocking development in Ultimate Fighter history this week, there is still time for Jackson vs. Griffin to become a hotly anticipated fight. But as it stands, their good-natured personalities have backfired in achieving the ultimate goal of the show, which is to build a big money fight at the end.