The Ultimate Fighter 14: Mid-Season Thoughts (Part 2)

Continuing my look at the first half (or so) of TUF 14 from the other day, Part 2 will include rants on participants not showing passion in the cage, the silliness of “moles” on the show and my thoughts on what we might see in the second half of the season.

Where was that passion during the fight?

I don’t want to single out John Albert for doing something that dozens of fighters have done in the fourteen seasons of “The Ultimate Fighter”, but he presents the most recent example of a strange trend, so he’ll have to do. The trend that I’m speaking of is fighting with little to no intensity or desperation in the final round of a losing effort, then immediately going into “this is my life, I wanted to win so bad” mode afterwards.

Contrast a crying, emotional and disappointed Albert that we saw after the fight with the lethargic, strangely relaxed fighter that we saw in the second round against John Dodson, and you have to ask yourself where all of that passion was during the actual fight. Though Albert immediately knew that he had lost the fight (he nodded knowingly as the decision was announced), he did little to take a second round that was largely up for grabs.

During the second round, Albert stayed in the center of the cage but did little other than throw jabs and counters that nearly always fell far short of the mark, even though he enjoyed a large height and reach advantage against Dodson. When Dodson would come forward with a flurry, Albert would routinely back away without answering. In the last minute of the fight, there was no desperate flurry or takedown attempt to try to steal the round or even finish the bout, even though Albert surely knew he was facing a loss and thus, elimination from the show.

What kills me about this type of thing is that I don’t doubt that Albert wanted to win the show. It’s not like I doubt the authenticity of his sadness and disappointment after the fight. But if you buy into that disappointment, how do you explain such a detached, lethargic performance?

Yeah, I know that Albert was tired. That much was clear. How many times, though, have we seen extremely tired fighters pull together for a final charge in order to make the fight go there way? Countless times. I don’t know whether some fighters are relived to get the pressure of performing on the show out of the way, or whether the intense schedule simply drains them more emotionally and physically than a normal training camp, or what. Perhaps if we saw the reactions of more fighters in the regular UFC events, we would find that this phenomenon isn’t exclusive to the show at all.

Spare me the obvious rebuttal: I know that I’m a lazy guy on a laptop somewhere who’s never been in a fight and doesn’t know what he’s talking about and all of that good stuff. I don’t have to be a professional fighter to have made several observations in my 15 years of watching the sport, however, one of which is that fighters frequently show an intensity immediately after a fight that is strangely lacking just minutes beforehand, when something can actually still be done to change the result.

So, the question remains: if you want it that badly, why weren’t you trying to do more during the fight?

If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t…wait, what?

Every season, one of the brain-numbingly dumb storylines that returns is that of the “mole” who leaks information to the other team or makes an “alliance” with members of the opposite team. This year, that role has been filled by none other than Dodson, who bested Albert in this week’s second fight.

Now, I won’t waste time on the “alliance” issue, since no one has ever benefited in any real way from any such agreement on the show. Look, you have to fight to move on, and there’s no way around that, so how does forming an “alliance” help you? You can’t vote the other guys off the island, right?

The mole thing is nearly just as dumb, though, and I was glad to see that Jason “Mayhem” Miller recognized that. Miller didn’t get mad or upset with Dodson, though he did rightfully acknowledge that since whether or not a mole can really hurt the team, he knew it would cause friction among his charges (anyone familiar with realistic conflict theory gets that, as well as that simply putting different colored jerseys on a group of strangers is enough to create friction).

So Miller told Dodson that while it wasn’t a big deal, his teammates were sure to take it pretty seriously and that Dodson should cut it out to help avoid tension within the team. Of course, then we get Dodson’s fight and him saying multiple times with a grin and a shrug that “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying”. This makes great sense, but only if the way in which you’re cheating is going to help you win. Since telling Michael Bisping’s team the matchups ahead of time did nothing to help him, what the hell was Dodson talking about?

And furthermore, what does it really matter if he’s telling Bisping’s team stuff? These guys live together, for God’s sake. Half the time they’re bragging to each other about what they’re going to do when they fight or what they’re best at, virtually giving away their game plans in the process. Those are the same game plans, by the way, that barely any of them bother to stick to once the fight starts. My point is this: when you see a preview of next week’s episode and the main storyline is that of one or another team having a “mole”, you know that they simply had nothing else to focus on and had to resort to that tired shit again. Here’s an idea: how about some training footage that isn’t cut like an MTV music video so that we can get a look at how these guys actually prepare for fights? Oh, I know, “nobody wants to see that, they want reality TV tropes to be revisited over and over again, blah blah blah.”

My (certainly inaccurate) thoughts on the rest of TUF 14

So, who are the favorites in the two weight classes for the rest of the show? It’s hard to pick finalists for each class, though I’d like to, since the matchups are rather arbitrarily decided in ridiculous fashion by Dana White himself once we get near the end, so I’ll just have to post my favorite and perhaps a dark horse in each class.

Featherweight: Dustin Pague

Call me crazy, and I know he didn’t come into the show with the best pedigree of the group, but I’ve been impressed with Pague so far. He was known as being a powerful striker but showed much more in his performance against Louis Gaudinot, who was one of the favorites to win the featherweight portion of the show. His well-rounded skills could get him all the way through to the title.

Bantamweight: TJ Dillashaw

I picked one of the only two bantamweights yet to fight, but that has almost as much to do with what I’ve seen of the bantamweights so far as it has to do with Dillashaw’s ability and potential. I just haven’t seen anything out of the bantamweights who have fought so far that makes me want to reverse my pre-season thought that Dillashaw would win the bantamweight tournament. Dillashaw has a decent wrestling pedigree, trains at a great camp, and is always in awesome shape. Being in great shape and able to control opponents positionally have always been key ingredients to success on “The Ultimate Fighter”, and I don’t expect that to change.

E-Mail Jon Hartley

Tags: Dustin Pague, Jason "Mayhem" Miller, John Albert, John Dodson, Michael Bisping, The Ultimate Fighter, The Ultimate Fighter 14, TJ Dillashaw, TUF 14