The 18th season of the UFC’s reality show The Ultimate Fighter debuted on Fox Sports 1 on Wednesday evening. The season will see UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey coaching opposite Miesha Tate. This season will be the first to feature female head coaches, it will also be the first time that men and women live in the TUF house together, competing for separate UFC contracts.
When the promotion was in Boston in August for UFC Fight Night 26, members of the media, and the TUF coaches screened the first episode. Following the screening, the Rousey and Tate took questions from the media about the show, offering there opinions on certain aspects of the reality show format.
From Rousey’s tone, it was clear that she had developed a special relationship with her team of fighters during the filiming of the show. It was also clear that she wasn’t 100 percent happy with the entire process and where the UFC’s priorities were:
It kind of set the tone for the whole series, where they would purposely go out of there way to manipulate me to make me react as dramatically as possible. That’s probably one of the reasons I walked away from the whole experience with a pretty sour taste in my mouth. They didn’t really care about making it easy on us. They cared about making it entertaining for everybody else. It was nice to know right off the bout what their priorities were, and it definitely wasn’t us.
For more from Rousey and Tate, check out the video.
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