“I think the show does need to change, but a straight-ahead training version of what they have now would be boring as shit and lose viewers. They need to do about 10-15 of house/training, 15 minutes on background and story of each guy and who they are, and then the fight. All these guys tend to have interesting backgrounds, it’s time to focus on them.”

At first I figured that a Efrain victory would be good for UFC expansion in Mexico since Efrain was born in Mexico and is much more genuine than Golden Boy and Huerta. But Efrain fights a very American collegiate wrestling style as opposed to the scrappy aggressive style that Mexican fight fans generally identify with. But at least putting him in Mexico would be OK whereas playing up Huerta’s heritage in Mexico would be a joke almost up there with Marcus “The Irish Hand Grenade” Davis. When it comes to building international stars, the UFC really has their work cut out for them.

The Junie push takes the cake though. Junie will lose to a good fighter, lose his temper and then wash out of the UFC. I just don’t see what’s so amazing about him. Another over-hyped fighter like Nover.

My gf watched it every week with me, mostly because of Junie initially, and by the finale she kept asking when her favorite guys from the house, Efrain and Kristof, would fight next so she could watch them.

That anecdote is pretty spot-on in describing what happened with almost every single person that became UFC fans by watching TUF. They like the entertainment, but become fans of the best fighters in the house.

I don’t get what is so hard to grasp here; TUF made UFC. TUF made UFC through stupid antics, you can basically credit Chris Leben with the MMA boom for his antics. People aren’t watching TUF for “pure sport” or anything else like that. They are watching it to see guys piss on each other’s beds.

Also, that is how fighters are. Fighters are immature jock dudes looking to one up each other. Put them in a house and you get pranks. It happened in the Lion’s Den, why wouldn’t it happen in TUF houses? It is basically just a 13 week frat house.

Regardless of the Fertittas, White or Zuffa say or do, the reality is that TUF is worthless if no one watches. And sadly, the truth is that if they played TUF straight no one would watch. And TUF is worth more as a franchise and fan-recruiter for Zuffa as a popular, if low-brow, show than an unpopular one played straight.

On a broader level of whether it’s “okay” or not for all of these Trash TV antics to not only be tolerated by the UFC and Spike TV, but actually encouraged and rewarded, it depends on what you’re looking at the show to do. If it’s just supposed to be gutter-trash television that draws a 1.3 rating instead of a 1.0 rating, then it’s justifiable. But using the UFC’s own definition of what the show is supposed to be (as Lorenzo Fertitta said to Spiegel Online, “People were surprised to find out that the fighters work hard, that they’re not crude thugs but great athletes, intelligent and with good manners”), it’s moving farther and farther away from that all the time.

The idea seems to be out there that you need to have these kinds of Trash TV antics or else nobody would be interested in watching, but that is a false choice. It’s not a black-and-white choice between Trash TV and no show at all. Luke Thomas on Bloody Elbow put it better than I could: “There is an enormous universe of interesting content between watching fighters train and watching them ingest one another’s bodily fluids. It’s nothing more than a poverty of imagination and reliance on the lowest common denominator that prevents Spike’s producers from delivering that sort of content. Hopefully some of the pushback from this season will scale back the boorish nonsense we were subjected to this time around.”