Another season of The Ultimate Fighter is upon us and it has everything needed, like drama and in-depth story telling.
Episode 1
Season 31 coaches Conor McGregor and Michael Chandler meet up in the UFC Apex and start a little bit of smack talking. There is a heavy emphasis that McGregor has been out of fighting for several years due to his injury while fighting Dustin Poirier in their trilogy match.
At the first meeting, Dana White announces that this season is going to be a team of veterans versus a team of up and coming prospects in the bantamweight and lightweight divisions.
The coaches are given the choice of which groups they want on their teams. McGregor wins the coin toss and initially chooses the prospects while Chandler who when he gets to pick, intentionally chooses the veterans, resulting in both teams being composed of just veterans and just up and comers.
The next day, the fighters are put through an assessment training session. Michael Chandler goes with a calculated assessment in which he looks at their grappling and striking individually. McGregor goes with more of a hard sparring session instead.
Based on their individual team assessments, the coaches rank their fighters in each of their weight classes from the one seed to the four seed, who will be matched up against the opposing teams’ one through four seeds.
Based off of the seeding, the first match up is determined to be Roosevelt Roberts of Team Chandler matched up against Nate Jennerman of Team McGregor.
The actual match goes very quickly as Roberts is able to knockout Jennerman within a few seconds of the start of the match.
Episode 2
Episode 2 starts out with Timur Valiev of Team Chandler arriving at the UFC Apex and getting ready to fight against Team McGregor’s Trevor Wells. However, Wells isn’t cleared to fight due to a cold sore that was spotted during the pre-fight physical examination. As a result, the fight is delayed and there is discussion about possibly making the fight a catch-weight bout so that the fighters don’t have to make weight two weeks in a row.
As a result, the next match is set up to be Cody Gibson of Team Chandler against Mando Gutierrez of Team McGregor.
In the match, Gibson is able to control the fight until he sets up a flying knee that knocks out Gutierrez, making it a perfect 2-0 for Team Chandler.
Episode 3
For episode three, Aaron McKenzie from Team McGregor faced off against Austin Hubbard of Team Chandler. Hubbard is able to control the fight, almost finishing it at several times and due to the two round judging, Hubbard is given an unanimous decision victory after two rounds.