20 Seasons of 'The Ultimate Fighter': Part II

10. Season 7: Team Rampage vs. Team Forrest

Premiered April 2, 2008
Top Alumni: Matt Brown, C.B. Dollaway, Amir Sadollah
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 4

Season 7 might be a different story if MMA’s most gifted stoner east of Stockton, Matthew Riddle, had stuck around. As it is, it’s still pretty strong, with ageless violence factory Brown still on roster and the inexplicably blacklisted Gerald Harris still a viable pro who could probably beat quite a few UFC middleweights. “TUF 7” gave us one of MMA’s great success stories, at least in proportion to his fighting skills, in the form of future carb whisperer Mike Dolce. It also gave us one of the more depressing instances of self-destruction in a series famous for them, as it was immediately after taping concluded that Jesse Taylor went on the drunken bender that derailed his Octagon career before it even started.

9. Season 17: Team Jones vs. Team Sonnen

Premiered Jan. 22, 2013
Top Alumni: Kelvin Gastelum, Uriah Hall, Zak Cummings
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 3

For a season that was conjured up to hype a completely unnecessary title fight, “TUF 17” produced a couple of surprising prospects — and pulled surprisingly engaged coaching performances out of Jones and Sonnen. Until the last two years, Gastelum was essentially shouldering the legacy of Season 17 by himself, as he fought his way into the Top 10 at welterweight, then all the way to an interim title shot at middleweight. It’s a two-man race these days, as Hall has experienced a late-career resurgence and is on the fringes of the middleweight title picture himself. Outside of those two and the quietly consistent Cummings, Season 17 is a near-total loss.

8. Season 8: Team Nogueira vs. Team Mir

Premiered Sept. 17, 2008
Top Alumni: Ryan Bader, Krzysztof Soszynski, Tom Lawlor
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 3
Notable Achievements: Bellator MMA heavyweight title (Bader), Bellator MMA light heavyweight title (Bader)

Season 8 suffers from Soszynski and Lawlor bowing out of the sport early for reasons of brain injury and pro wrestling, respectively, and from Bader’s greatest accomplishments coming in the round Bellator cage. However, Bader was a longtime Top 10 contender in the UFC as well, and the light heavyweight half of the cast is generally quite solid. The lightweights are another matter entirely; when the cream of the crop, Efrain Escudero, was a sub-.500 fighter in the UFC, and the infamous Junie Allen Browning isn’t even the worst, that says a lot about what we’re working with. Kudos to David Kaplan, who knows the capital of every country on earth — or did, at least, before Lawlor punched half of them out of his skull.

7. Season 4: The Comeback

Premiered Aug. 17, 2006
Top Alumni: Matt Serra, Chris Lytle, Patrick Cote
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 3
Notable Achievements: UFC welterweight title (Serra), UFC Hall of Fame (Serra)

It’s only “The Terror,” and the night he pulled off one of the greatest title upsets in UFC history, that keeps the all-veteran Season 4 in the Top 10. Serra’s shocking knockout of Georges St. Pierre at UFC 69 was a direct result of his winning the Season 4 tournament, and adds an aura of triumph to the whole thing. Outside of Serra’s moment of glory, it’s actually surprising how little the UFC benefited from a season stocked with some very solid veterans. Lytle and Cote remained reliable action fighters and fringe contenders for another several years, with Cote even making his way to a middleweight title shot, but the last 10 fighters in the Season 4 redraft won a total of five UFC fights between them.

6. Season 15: Team Cruz vs. Team Faber

Premiered March 9, 2012
Top Alumni: Michael Chiesa, Al Iaquinta, James Vick
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 7

This season has the potential to climb further if Chiesa makes it to a welterweight title shot — let alone win a belt. The “live,” all-lightweight 15th season found a treasure trove of up-and-coming talent despite drawing on the same general pool of fighters as Seasons 12 and 13. Seven fighters went on to at least 10 fights in the UFC, including contenders Chiesa and Iaquinta, more than any season since the very first. All Season 15 is missing is a signature alumnus: a champ, a multiple-time title contender or transcendent star. Everything else is there to qualify Team Cruz vs. Team Faber as one of the five best seasons.

5. Season 5: Team Penn vs. Team Pulver

Premiered April 5, 2007
Top Alumni: Nate Diaz, Gray Maynard, Joe Lauzon
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 6

Only Michael Bisping’s late-career title win keeps Season 5 behind Season 3 in this list. Otherwise, the all-lightweight fifth iteration of the series was superior in just about every way. Pivoting to a weight class that the show had not yet visited — and which the UFC needed badly — yielded a class of young, hungry prospects. Diaz’s ascent to become one of the biggest stars in the sport makes him the face of the season, but Maynard’s competitive peaks were even higher, and if Frankie Edgar’s head were not made of titanium, he probably would have won a UFC title. Outside of the very top tier, Season 5 supplied audience-pleasing mid-card mainstays like Cole Miller and Matt Wiman. It also provided some of the most memorably ridiculous moments in series history, thanks to season goofballs Gabe Ruediger and Andy Wang.

4. Season 3: Team Ortiz vs. Team Shamrock

Premiered April 6, 2006
Top Alumni: Michael Bisping, Matt Hamill, Ed Herman
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 4
Notable Achievements: UFC light heavyweight title (Bisping), UFC Hall of Fame (Bisping)

The third season of “TUF” is when the bottom began to fall out. Revisiting the same light heavyweight and middleweight divisions the inaugural season had mined so successfully just a year before, “TUF 3” was fine at the top — Bisping is right up there with Griffin and Evans among the greatest fighters ever to come out of the show — but the future roster depth just wasn’t there. Four cast members would go on to fight at least 10 times in the UFC, including Kendall Grove and the now-grizzled Herman, who earlier this year outlasted Diego Sanchez to become the earliest “TUF” alum still on roster. Past those four, however, the remaining 12 fighters from Season 3 combined for five Octagon wins.

3. Season 14: Team Bisping vs. Team Miller

Premiered Sept. 21, 2011
Top Alumni: T.J. Dillashaw, John Dodson, Dennis Bermudez
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 5
Notable Achievements: UFC bantamweight title (Dillashaw)

Like Season 5 years before, the 14th season rejuvenated the talent pool simply by focusing on weight classes that had not already been overfished. The 16 featherweights and bantamweights who made up the Season 5 cast yielded Dillashaw, who may be on paper the most accomplished fighter to come out of the first 20 seasons. It also brought in future contenders Dodson, Bermudez, Diego Brandao and Bryan Caraway. In stark contrast to just about every season after the first two, Season 14 was all about depth: 13 of the 16 cast members managed to win at least one fight in the UFC.

2. Season 2: Team Hughes vs. Team Franklin

Premiered Aug. 22, 2005
Top Alumni: Rashad Evans, Joe Stevenson, Keith Jardine
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 6
Notable Achievements: UFC light heavyweight title (Evans), UFC Hall of Fame (Evans)

The drop-off in talent from Season 1 to Season 2 was noticeable, but the eight heavyweights and eight welterweights who made up the cast still represented a bounty of solid roster guys for the UFC. Below the top tier of future champion Evans and future lightweight title challenger Stevenson, fighters like Joshua Burkman, Jardine and Melvin Guillard stuck around as television mainstays for years. Even the season’s castoffs served the UFC’s purposes in their own way: Seth Petruzelli may have gone 0-4 in the Octagon, but he hit EliteXC like a guided missile, blowing up Kimbo Slice — and one of the UFC’s upstart rival promotions — with a single, fateful jab.

1. Season 1: Team Liddell vs. Team Couture

Premiered Jan. 17, 2005
Top Alumni: Forrest Griffin, Diego Sanchez, Kenny Florian
Fighters with 10 or More UFC Bouts: 8
Notable Achievements: UFC light heavyweight title (Griffin), UFC Hall of Fame (Griffin; Bonnar; Sanchez)

It’s no surprise that the first season was the one that came closest to embodying the “TUF” ideal. In hindsight, that incredible inaugural series set a precedent that would prove unsustainable. With practically the entire free-agent talent pool of worldwide MMA available, the show’s scouts picked out a crew of fighters who would end up forming the backbone of several UFC divisions for the rest of the decade. Fully half of the 16 men who entered the “TUF” house in late 2004 would end up logging 10 or more UFC bouts, and incredibly, all eight ended up with winning records in the Octagon.

“TUF 1” also set the pattern for all future seasons in terms of story and intangibles. The first “TUF” bully, the first tortured head case, the first charming oddball; they’re all there. So are the first gross-out pranks, the first drunken screaming matches and the first moments of real human triumph and tragedy. That the coaches used the season to carry on perhaps the greatest rivalry of the “pre-TUF” era, bridging the gap between the days of struggle and the global MMA explosion, only makes it more perfect.