If you ever hope to catch UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey as a coach on the UFC’s reality show The Ultimate Fighter, you better make sure you tune in during the upcoming season of the show.
Rousey will coach the latest iteration of the TUF franchise opposite Miesha Tate. The premiere episode of the 18th season will air on Wednesday at 10 p.m. on Fox Sports 1. To hear Rousey speak, nothing short of a truckload of cash will be enough to get her to appear on TUF again.
The upcoming season will see Rousey and Tate coach teams of both male and female bantamweights. It’s the first time the show will feature women as coaches. It’s also the first time both men and women will live in the TUF house at the same time.
Rousey was originally set to coach opposite Cat Zingano, but a knee injury and follow up surgery prevented Zingano from participating. In her place stepped the woman Zingano defeated by TKO in April of this year, Miesha Tate.
Rousey and Tate have never seen eye to eye. They have also fought before with Rousey submitting Tate to capture the Strikeforce women’s bantamweight title in March 2012. As far as a coaching rivalry is concerned, the UFC couldn’t have asked for a better matchup.
Rousey, speaking to MMAJunkie.com about the upcoming season of TUF said that she’s not looking forward to how she will be portrayed on the show:
How could people possibly know who you are from a couple of clips of a video that people are seeing out of context? That’s no way for people to get to know you, so I’m just preparing for people to get the worst idea of who I am.
Rousey has a valid point. TUF, like almost all reality shows is designed to get viewers to react, to get them to buy into the drama, to get them coming back for more week after week. To accomplish that, the show takes a week’s worth of video and compresses it into less than an hour of actual footage. A lot of context gets left on the cutting room floor on reality television; TUF is no exception to that rule.
As for how much it would take to get Rousey to appear for a second time on The Ultimate Fighter? The champion told MMAJunkie that it would take a hefty sum, “You couldn’t pay me $10 million to do it again.”
Rousey will defend her title against Tate in the co-main event of UFC 168. That fight card, which will take place on December 28 from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, will be headlined by the rematch between UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman and former champion Anderson Silva.
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