MVN - Most Valuable Network

New season of The Ultimate Fighter now has some coaches

Spike TV announced today that the UFC interim heavyweight champion Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Frank Mir will be the coaches for the next season of The Ultimate Fighter. The show will be taped from the middle of this month until the end of June and then air on Spike this fall building up to a fight between Nogueira and Mir at the December UFC pay-per-view.

The contestants should really improve their BJJ with Mir and Nogueira being two of the best in the world. I’m sure a lot of drama will be brought to the show since there is really no bad blood between Mir and Nogueira to build up their fight. This will be a great chance for Nogueira to get exposed to the American fight fan. Since most of his fight career has been spent in Japan, there is a large audience that will get to see Nogueira’s greatness for the first time.

While I like the choices of coaches and their fight should be a good one, this speaks to the lack of depth in the heavyweight division right now. Although Mir is a former champion, I’m surprised he gets the next title shot having lost two of his last five fights and his last win came against UFC newcomer, Brock Lesnar.

As always, the shows should be entertaining and I look forward to the exposure Nogueira will get to build his name as a top fighter in this country. Their fight in December should turn out to be the best heavyweight fight in the UFC this year.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Frank Mir, Brock Lesnar, The Ultimate Fighter, UFC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.