Is the UFC Letting too Many Prospects Slip Away to Bellator?

TUF needs to be re-imagined as something other than a tool for finding prospects. Think season 4 but every season.

Zuffa needs their own regional/developmental promotion(s) in order to bring prospects under the Zuffa banner even if they aren’t ready for the big show yet. Their losing out on too many raw prospects because they aren’t ready for the UFC but Zuffa has nowhere else to put them.

In an ideal world, Zuffa and Bellator could come to an agreement on some kind of formalized transfer agreement but between Bjorn Rebney’s big ambitions and Zuffa’s insistence on complete control, we won’t see anything like that anytime soon.

and not wanting to risk TUF…I think a guy like Jake Rosholt could have benefitted from the Tuf treatment though.

been worrying about this myself.

too many crappy TUF guys in the system. i don’t watch the show. every time i see someone on a televised broadcast who’s like 3-3 in the UFC and i’m like “who the heck is this guy?” i click on his page and i was on tuf.

if bellator and strikeforce were going to act ast he minor leagues, that’s one thing. the problem is that they want to keep their fighters and rival the ufc. so if they just fill up their roster with TUF guys instead of signing legit prospects, they could be in trouble.

maybe they should merge the lower weight classes from the WEC into the UFC and then use it more as the minor leagues for all the weight classes. i don’t know. but it’s frustrating to see good fighters go to other promotions. i want all the best fighters to be in one place.

At least the current incarnation is. All it does is promote less than stellar fighters, fighters who can be moved to the UFC and paid less than better, lesser known ones. Either move to a serious, high paying development tournament, a la Bellator, or fold it. Because, all it does is push crappier fighters on us while driving down wages for the more talented men.

On a related note, I would die for a TUF with Tyron Woodley, Ben Askren, Roger Bowlings, Andre Galvoa, Tarec Saffedience, and Dan Hornbuckle.

Even a promotion on a shoestring budget like Sengoku has a developmental program that blows the doors off of the UFC’s half-assed TV tournament. TUF has little to do with developing anything for UFC beyond the cheesey feuds between the coaches.

Based on their terrible live gates and awful TV deals Bellator may go out of business very soon, but then again they may not. As long as they’re out there competing for prospects with the UFC, Zuffa needs to get a bigger, better pipeline for developing talent.

He’s a pretty good prospect.

Anyone have an idea on how much the coaches make? When Leben called out Wanderlei for TUF I was smelling a paper chase.

That if the fighter is a real good prospect (Arsken, Warren, Soto, ect…) they wouldnt’ want to do TUF. The fact of the matter is that you are locked into a contract, and with a chance of injury or losing during the tournament, for some guys its not worth it.

Think about it now…Da Bronxs is killing it at 155… if the guys really wanted to promote him, they could have tried to get him onto TUF now..

I think the problem with TUF is that it requires personalities instead of talent. In order to get people to watch the show they pass up on tons of talented fighters with boring personalities. They should take that element out of the show and run it like Bellator runs their tournament. No more TUF house stocked with liquor, no more coaches, just a tournament that weeds out the shitty fighters.

TUF isn’t really about finding the next great fighter. If they do get some miles out of someone, it is just a bonus. TUF is basically a commercial for their PPVs.

As for Bellator or anyone like them, robbing the UFC of prospects, i think we have seen that many times these guys are not ready for the UFC and getting the experience is good for them. Bellator is like the KC Royals and the UFC is like teh NY Yankees. Eventually, the talent will end up on the big stage in most cases.

Am I the only one that thinks this season will produce some good lw’s and fw’s? Not many, but at least 2-3.

Skrew TUF. Put a Tourney in Asia. Kumite! Kumite! Kumite!

We’re assuming it sees TUF as its prospects machine. I’d argue it’s not. The UFC, as stated in the article, HAS been identifying prospects and signing them – Jon Jones, Junior Dos Santos, etc.

It’s possible the UFC simply sees TUF as advertisement – an advertisement it’s paid to provide by Spike. The UFC certainly hasn’t coddled any of the TUF contestants to a great degree, and certainly hasn’t had any qualms about cutting them loose in the last half dozen seasons. Who’s left from seasons 8, 9, 10 & 11? Not many. If they haven’t won, of they go.

We may be worrying about a problem the UFC doesn’t have.

Now, when they fail to sign significant prospects, then you have a problem.

If UFC had any interest in keeping TUF about the fighting, they’d have never let the garbage on Mir-Nog season air. That was the final proof that it’s a reality tv show, not a means of acquiring new talent.
Also, given how much talent the first seasons produced compared to the most recent ones, one might get the impression that the talent pool is drying up – or that the really, really, legit talented ones don’t want to risk their chance at an elimination tournament (and having to deal with the house shenanigans).

Bitching about Bellator and Strikeforce holding onto their talent is kinda stupid. There’s nothing in it for them if they started to act like a UFC feeder league – or can someone honestly see Zuffa compensating them for the fighters they’d ‘provide’? Of course they’ll try to hold on to their top talent – it’s their future they’re dealing with. Sure, it’d be nice to see guys like Askren in UFC but don’t blame Bellator for signing them up and not wanting them to jump ship mid-contract – blame Zuffa for not picking them up in the first place.

It’s essentially an extended promotional tool for an upcoming fight between whatever coaches they choose. Not to mention it’s a way to maintain a weekly presence on cable TV. They don’t market it as a place where prospects come out of. They market it towards building the fight between the coaches and whoever the winner ends up being. That’s pretty much it. The entire show needs a serious overhaul.

Say, $50,000. They could also give money for winning fights on the show. I know they get $5000 for finishing, maybe bump it up to $5000 for winning, and $10,000 for finishing. They could also bump up the starting salary for the show winner to something higher than what the other guys from the show who stick around get. Never made sense to me that they all get the same contracts, even though one guy won the show. Give the show winner a 20/20 contract. That, along with a $50,000 prize and between $15,000 and $30,000 from their wins on the show, I think you’d have a lot of these Bellator guys choosing to go the TUF route instead.
One block of commercials would pay for all the extra cash they’d be giving out. If the show winner flops in the UFC, cut him, or make him sign a smaller deal, not like they haven’t done it before.

The UFC’s future strategy for prospect development is the single most important unknown for the brand and the fans of the sport. Right now they certainly don’t have as much control as they’d like over the worldwide field of prospects.

do not belong in the same sentence

But when those ‘prospects’ become ‘contenders’ or ‘champions, they’ll just end up in the UFC in the end.

in an excellent article that I otherwise agree with, but we should probably stop referring to the UFC’s #1 and #2 heavyweight contenders as “prospects.”

Good article. With these other MMA organizations out there like Strikeforce, Bellator, MFC, DREAM, Sengoku and whatnot, good prospects just get picked up so quickly. I feel that TUF tends to get the scraps of what’s out there, and maybe there will have a diamond in the rough among those scraps. While the Brits have losses in the UFC, I felt that the TUF 9 Brits were all pretty good and have potential. Winner, Pearson, and Nick O all are young and have potential to be 10 top fighters in the future in my opinion. James Wilks though seems like he’ll be a mid-tier fighter. While the MMA prospects in the U.S. get picked up pretty quickly, I wonder if having more internationally themed TUFs will bring some higher level prospects through the TUF system?

Not all of them are meant to be the up and coming fighters, the rising stars, the belt holders. The other role is to fill out the middle of the division, give the legit future champions a lot of gristle to chew on before hitting the big show. For me, that is whats great about the show. Even if a world-ender isn’t found, there will be 3/4 guys who can be journeymen and gatekeepers to fill out the division a bit more.

TUF has a use for the UFC even if it doesn’t produce champions. It gives backstory and fan connection to guys that fight in early PPV matches or as headliners on Spike. TUF alums are a liitle more well known and poular with casual fans so they can always be used for prelims and UFN’s and be a pretty good draw, moreso than guys like the prospects mentioned in this article.