Dana White announced on the Underground that next season’s TUF coaches will be Michael Bisping and Jason Miller. The hope is that Bisping and Miller’s personalities will add some punch to the reality series.
Coming to the conclusion of a disappointing TUF season which saw a decrease in ratings, little drama and Brock Lesnar pulling out of his fight with Junior dos Santos due to a reoccurrence of divericulitis, the UFC is trying to breathe life back into TUF. White has critiqued the poor ratings citing the fact that they had to do away with the initial Elimination Fights to get into the house as a factor for the poor ratings.
Payout Perspective:
These are two very good choices for next season. While the UFC initially wanted Chael Sonnen to be a coach on TUF, Miller is an excellent substitute. Bisping is a good choice from the standpoint that he is a fiery competitor and mixed it up when he was a coach during season 9 of TUF opposite Dan Henderson. Furthermore, Bisping-Henderson provided good ratings for TUF. Its a good spot for Miller. Although he has not fought in the UFC since signing this year, he is one that can create good (or watchable) television (ask CBS about the Nashville incident). He’s also hosted Bully Beatdown on MTV2 so he’s not new to what it takes to create good reality television.
The other news for next season’s TUF is that it will feature featherweights and bantamweights. This should give some added intrigue to how next season will play out. How will fans react to the smaller weight divisions?
Great choice. I think Mayhem may be a better foil for Bisping than Sonnen. Mayhem will irritate the hell out of Bisping, while Sonnen is really in his own universe. I expected Sonnen to rile Silva up considering his epic level of trash talk, especially with Silva taking offense to relatively benign words from Maia. Sonnen, though, was so outrageous that Silva had no choice to brush him off–how could he respond to that level of crazy? I think a similar thing was at risk at happening to Bisping–everyone would expect him to cry about Sonnen’s antics and/or explode in anger, but he may have just been overwhelmed. Mayhem is a more garden variety of nut case.
I dunno
I think this season pretty much proved that no one tunes in for the coaches. Even if you subscribe to the theory that the lack of friction between the coaches was the downfall of this season, that doesn’t explain why the first episode failed to do big numbers. If Brock Lesnar coaching can’t revive the franchise, I seriously doubt that Mayhem Miller coaching will.
People may not tune in based on the box office drawing power of the coaches, but I do think they are drawn in by conflict between coaches. Such conflict won’t necessarily draw people in from day one, but builds up over time. In the Rampage-Rashad case, we knew these guys hated each other going in, unlike Lesnar-Dos Santos. You could argue the success of season 10 was due to Kimbo, but Kimbo did not make a PPV dent at all with his fight against Mitrione, while Rampage/Rashad was by far the biggest non-title fight in UFC history. This suggests the conflict between the two, rather than Kimbo, drove the huge ratings of season 10.