Sherdog Redraft: ‘The Ultimate Fighter’
Ben
Duffy/Sherdog.com illustration
Hindsight is 20/20
For a certain type of sports fan, the draft is one of the most exciting events of the season, a chance to test their own scouting chops against the so-called pros or simply see how prospects pan out once they hit the next level. Decisions are made in the presence of unknowns, risks are taken or avoided, and plenty of picks look either inspired or ridiculous with the benefit of hindsight.
Advertisement
Season 20: Team Pettis vs. Team Melendez
Twenty seasons into the “TUF” experience—not counting the proliferation of international versions—the creators of the well-worn reality television show managed to inject some new life into things. “The Ultimate Fighter Season 20” featured a number of significant firsts. It was the first all-women’s iteration of the show, and it was intended to usher an entirely new division into the UFC: the strawweights, including an inaugural champ who would be decided at the season finale.
“TUF 20,” which taped in July and August of 2014 and debuted on Fox
Sports 1 on Sept. 10 of that year, featured a cast of 16
strawweight hopefuls under the guidance of newly crowned UFC
lightweight champ Anthony
Pettis and his designated first challenger, Gilbert
Melendez. Half of the cast was plucked directly from Invicta FC, effectively gutting a division, but
instantly giving the UFC the best pool of 115-pound talent outside
of Asia. Unsurprisingly for a bunch of women who had been swimming
in the same waters for the last few years, quite a few of them had
already fought one another before the show, but past results proved
not to be a reliable indicator of future outcomes.
There was one more significant wrinkle for Season 20. While the teams were divided up by a draft as usual, there were only eight women picked. Prior to the draft, the show’s creators had secretly seeded all 16 participants, and when Pettis or Melendez selected a fighter, the opposite seed was automatically sent to the other team; for example, when Pettis understandably took outgoing Invicta champ Carla Esparza first overall, she was revealed to have been the No. 1 seed, and No. 16 Angela Hill joined Team Melendez. If one coach was a better judge of talent than the other, this unique setup had the potential to amplify that disparity, and so it did. Team Pettis absolutely slaughtered Team Melendez, and if not for one great draft pick, Season 20 might have overtaken the Miesha Tate-Ronda Rousey Season 18 and the Rashad Evans-Quinton Jackson Season 10 for the most lopsided draft in the show’s history. Such is the power of one young “Thug.”
In terms of talent and results, “TUF 20” is an oddball. A lot of the women simply weren’t that good, but because there was nothing else, they were all signed, and with the exception of three fighters, their records generally look miserable, as they beat up on each other and were then overrun by successive waves of new strawweight talent signed by the promotion over the next several years. That’s a story for another day, however. Without further ado, let us reorder the 16 women from “The Ultimate Fighter 20,” this time revisiting the UFC’s seeding as well as the coaches’ draft choices.
1. Rose Namajunas
Original Draft Position: 4 (No. 7 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 2-1
Post-TUF Record: 9-4
Notable Achievements: UFC strawweight champion (twice)
Mere weeks past her 22nd birthday and with just three professional fights, “Thug Rose” was the youngest fighter in the house and the second greenest after Angela Hill, who at least had a muay thai career prior to her entry into mixed martial arts. She had a certain amount of buzz, thanks to her relationship with then-UFC heavyweight Pat Barry, and an eye-popping, 12-second flying armbar submission of Kathina Lowe in her second professional fight, but she nonetheless felt like a risky call at the four spot, especially when the pick sent a solid veteran in Alex Chambers to Team Pettis. Namajunas justified her draft position, and then some, in the most direct way possible. She put any potential buyers’ remorse to bed in her very first fight, tapping out Chambers with ease, then knocked off Joanne Wood, the woman Pettis had chosen directly before her, in the semifinals. After submitting Randa Markos in the semis, her third straight submission on the show, she came up short against top overall pick Esparza.
Namajunas has gone on to win the UFC strawweight title twice and defend it three times, a number exceeded only by Joanna Jedrzejczyk’s five. Her skills have progressed astonishingly from the raw but promising prospect that appeared on the show, and at age 30, she has ample time to extend her legacy even further. The only true obstacle would appear to be her own commitment to the sport; always an introspective and sensitive figure, and after her baffling performance in losing her title to Esparza in May, a retirement announcement would not have been a shock. Only time will tell whether we see “Thug Rose” in the Octagon again—and which version we see—but her nemesis Esparza would appear to be the only one with even a prayer of passing her on this list.
2. Carla Esparza
Original Draft Position: 1 (No. 1 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 9-2
Post-TUF Record: 10-5
Notable Achievements: “TUF 20” season winner, UFC strawweight champion (twice)
Esparza was the easy top seed and the obvious No. 1 pick in the original draft, as the inaugural Invicta 115-pound champ and one of the best wrestlers ever to grace women’s MMA. Esparza justified her seeding, ripping through the tournament and proving just too strong, too seasoned and too confident for Namajunas in the final. “Cookie Monster” will forever be a part of history as the first UFC strawweight champion.
Placing Esparza second in this redraft behind a woman she has beaten twice is uncomfortable but the only justifiable decision. While she clearly has Namajunas’ number, in the overall picture of the division, she has been passed up. Consider: in the eight years since “TUF 20,” the strawweight title has been held by five women: Esparza, Namajunas, Jedrzejczyk, Jessica Andrade and Weili Zhang, who have fought one another in a nearly complete round-robin. Namajunas is 5-3 against the others with multiple title defenses, while Esparza is 2-2 and has failed to defend the belt during either of her reigns. The book is not closed on Esparza, however; despite her one-sided loss to Zhang earlier this month, the two-time champ appears to be fighting the best she ever has, and may be a fixture in the title picture for some time to come.
3. Tecia Torres
Original Draft Position: 2 (No. 3 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 4-0
Post-TUF Record: 9-6
The “Tiny Tornado” was and is one of the most appropriately nicknamed fighters in the sport, a diminutive, but powerfully built and blindingly athletic dynamo who came to “TUF 20” fresh off a win over Namajunas. Coach Melendez took her with his first pick and it worked out just fine...just not for Melendez, unfortunately. She was upset in the elimination round by her counterpart, No. 14 seed Randa Markos, but when Team Pettis’ Justine Kish had to withdraw from the show with an injury, Torres received a second chance and a new color jersey. This time, she fell to eventual winner Esparza in the quarterfinals, but not before giving her a tougher fight than anyone else on the show managed to.
Torres won her way into the UFC by thrashing Angela Magana at the finale, and has since embarked on a very streaky career where she has been prematurely written off more than once. Most recently, she carried a three-fight win streak into a high-stakes clash with Mackenzie Dern at UFC 273 in April, where she came up just short in a split-decision loss. She remains firmly ensconced in the Top 10 of her division, but having just announced her pregnancy—Torres is married to fellow UFC contender Raquel Pennington—an absence of at least a year appears to be up next for the 33-year-old.
4. Joanne Wood
Original Draft Position: 3 (No. 2 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 8-0
Post-TUF Record: 7-8
By way of warning, this is where “The Ultimate Fighter Season 20” begins to go off a cliff. Everyone from the cast stuck around in the UFC for at least a couple of fights—of course they did; they were practically the entire strawweight division—but from here to the bottom there is only one woman with a winning Octagon record. The 28-year-old Scot then known as Joanne Calderwood was seeded second, thanks to a spotless MMA record and a decorated muay thai career, and she made it as far as the quarterfinals before running into the worst possible style matchup in Namajunas. Wood’s 7-8 mark in the UFC is the result of some factors beyond her control; anytime she won two in a row, she was inevitably matched up with a Top 5 fighter in her next fight, a dynamic that only got worse when she moved up to the less-crowded flyweight division. It is also due in part to things she presumably could have fixed; of her eight losses in the UFC, five were by submission. Released by the UFC on a three-fight skid earlier this year, the future of “JoJo,” who turns 37 next month, is unclear.
5. Angela Hill
Original Draft Position: N/A (No. 16 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 1-0
Post-TUF Record: 13-12 (9-12 UFC)
Notable Achievements: Invicta FC strawweight champion
If you want to shuffle Hill, Felice Herrig, Jessica Penne and Randa Markos into some other order in the next four spots, you’ll get no argument from me. Each woman has something to recommend them: Herrig is the only one of the four with a .500 UFC record, Markos has the best peak wins, including a head-to-head steamrolling of Hill, Penne is the only one to have fought for a title, and Hill has the largest overall body of work and hardest strength of schedule. Whether you put Hill fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth, however, there’s no arguing that she’s the steal of the draft aside from maybe Namajunas. Seeded dead last, the 1-0 former kickboxer from Maryland was foisted on Team Melendez when Pettis sensibly took Esparza first, and was victimized by rough matchups. She faced Esparza in the elimination round, then drew Namajunas and Torres in her first two UFC assignments. Having gone 0-3 against the best three women in the cast, she was cut loose from the promotion, only to head to Invicta and win four straight, picking up the strawweight title in the process. That earned her a return call from the UFC, and since then she has gone 9-10, providing consistently entertaining fights and serving as a tough out for nearly everyone.
6. Felice Herrig
Original Draft Position: N/A (No. 6 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 9-5
Post-TUF Record: 5-5
“Lil Bulldog” was not picked on the show—she was assigned to Team Pettis when Melendez selected her counterpart Heather Clark—but in the end she easily outperformed Clark and vindicated her own No. 6 seeding. Eliminated from the tournament by Markos, Herrig tapped out Lisa Ellis at the finale to earn a UFC berth, then embarked on a run that saw her briefly enter the strawweight title picture. That came to an end in a split-decision loss to Karolina Kowalkiewicz, which in turn sparked a death spiral for the Chicago native’s career. The Kowalkiewicz loss was the first of four straight, punctuated by several lengthy injury layoffs. After the most recent of those losses, a second-round submission in a rematch with Kowalkiewicz this June, the 37-year-old called it a career.
7. Randa Markos
Original Draft Position: N/A (No. 14 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 4-1
Post-TUF Record: 7-10-1
Markos went to Team Pettis as the counterpart to Melendez’s pick of third-seeded Torres, and by any measure, she greatly outperformed expectations. She made it as far as the semifinals, eliminating the No. 3 and 6 seeds along the way, before being eliminated by Namajunas. She lost to Jessica Penne but was signed by the UFC anyway—again, the 16 women from the show were essentially the entire strawweight division—and for the next five years put together a remarkable string of alternating wins and losses, punctuated only by a draw against Marina Rodriguez. While that run was entertaining and statistically bizarre, it also kept her Octagon winning rate right around .500, so when the wheels fell off, as they did in a four-fight skid from 2019-2020, her record went from comedy to tragedy. While the crimson-coiffed Canadian bounced back with one final win in October 2021, the promotion elected not to renew her contract. She has not fought since.
8. Jessica Penne
Original Draft Position: 5 (No. 4 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 11-2
Post-TUF Record: 3-4
Penne is one of the more difficult women to place in this draft. Her triumphs as well as her low points are often qualified by a “yeah, but.” She is the only woman outside of the top two who has even fought for a UFC title, but it was a short-notice pairing born of a lack of other alternatives, and Joanna Jedrzejczyk gave her a pasta necklace and a concussion for her trouble. She has fought just seven times since the show and should probably have achieved much more, but her career has been punctuated by multiple USADA suspensions, but those suspensions were probably too harsh and would not have kept her away for most of four years under current guidelines. Beyond all the buts and what-ifs, Penne returned from her second suspension last April and has remained surprisingly relevant, going 2-1 even as she approaches her 40th birthday.
9. Justine Kish
Original Draft Position: 7 (No. 9 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 4-0
Post-TUF Record: 4-6 (3-4 UFC)
Kish’s No. 9 seeding turned out to be perfect, and if she was slightly overdrafted by Pettis, it turned out just fine, since her counterpart, Bec Rawlings, didn’t set the world on fire for Team Melendez. Kish was a complete loss on the show, as she hurt her knee and was forced to withdraw from the tournament, but in a case of addition by subtraction, that opened the door for Tecia Torres to replace her, switching teams in the process. She would not make her UFC debut for well over a year, and once she was there she was never able to string together enough wins to break out of the pack in a growing division. Cut loose by the UFC last year, she signed with Bellator MMA, where she has picked up an impressive win over former flyweight champ Ilima-Lei Macfarlane, bookended by a pair of losses to fellow veteran DeAnna Bennett.
10. Aisling Daly
Original Draft Position: N/A (No. 5 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 14-5
Post-TUF Record: 2-1
Behold, the only woman in this draft after the first three picks who has a winning record in the UFC. You may scoff at her fighting just three times after the show, but knowing when to walk away is a far rarer skill in MMA than throwing a good one-two or checking a low kick. “Ais the Bash” wasn’t drafted despite the Conor McGregor connection and despite possessing one of the better records of any cast member, instead falling to Team Pettis when Melendez chose Angela Magana with the final pick. Daly lived up to her nickname, plunking Magana in the elimination round before being ousted by Penne in the quarterfinals. Daly beat castmate Alex Chambers at the finale, kicking off a too-brief UFC run. She had not fought in over a year when in early 2017 she announced her retirement due to medical issues revealed in a brain scan.
11. Heather Clark
Original Draft Position: 6 (No. 11 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 6-4
Post-TUF Record: 2-2 (1-2 UFC)
Clark was overdrafted—according to the UFC’s seedings, anyway—and ended up justifying her No. 11 seed. Getting eliminated by Herrig was no more than expected, but her split-decision win over Rawlings at the season finale was a bit of a surprise and the reason she sneaks ahead of “Rowdy Bec” in this redraft. Her losses to Kowalkiewicz and Alexa Grasso are simply a case of running into younger, more skilled fighters who were bigger than Clark, to boot. After a successful one-off fight in Invicta in July 2018, the “Hurricane” hasn’t been heard from again, and at age 42, may never be.
12. Bec Rawlings
Original Draft Position: N/A (No. 8 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 5-3
Post-TUF Record: 3-6 (2-5 UFC)
“Rowdy” was scheduled to face No. 9 seed Kish in the elimination round, when she received the cruel switcheroo of Kish pulling out and being replaced by Torres. That was too much for the tattooed Aussie who still went by Bec Hyatt at the time, as was a finale matchup with Heather Clark. Rawlings stuck in the UFC anyway, but never seriously flirted with even a .500 record with the promotion. She did, however, flirt with bare-knuckle boxing, finding surprising success in BKFC in between her stints with the UFC and Bellator. She has not fought in MMA since her win over Elina Kallionidou at Bellator 240 nearly three years ago.
13. Alex Chambers
Original Draft Position: N/A (No. 10 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 4-1
Post-TUF Record: 1-4
Chambers, to put it mildly, had rough sledding on “TUF 20.” She was a former standout grappler, but as an MMA prospect she was a perfect storm of bad: simultaneously the oldest woman in the house, one of the least experienced and one of the smallest. Even worse, as the No. 10 seed, her counterpart was the grossly underranked Namajunas, who tapped Chambers out with ease in the elimination round. Her 1-4 UFC run saw her lose to some much bigger, much younger women, but at least her lone post-TUF victory took place in front of a partisan Aussie crowd and netted her a post-fight bonus for “Performance of the Night.”
14. Lisa Ellis
Original Draft Position: N/A (No. 13 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 15-8
Post-TUF Record: 0-3 (0-2 UFC)
If you’re paying close attention, you may have noticed that No. 13 Chambers had just one win after appearing on the show, and you may be wondering how bad it was for the last three women in this redraft. Ellis, a veteran MMA grappler who had already tangled with the likes of Jessica Aguilar, Miku Matsumoto and Megumi Fujii by the time of “TUF 20,” was nonetheless tapped out in the first round by Penne on the show. She returned for the finale and was submitted once again, this time by Herrig. She would fight twice more, once against castmate Rawlings and once against future UFC strawweight Virna Jandiroba, being choked out in the first round both times.
15. Emily Kagan
Original Draft Position: N/A (No. 15 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 3-1
Post-TUF Record: 0-2
Kagan came to the “TUF” house on the back of a split-decision win in Invicta over future atomweight title challenger Ashley Cummins, which would end up being both her best and her last career victory. Kagan was bumped from the elimination round by No. 2 seeded Joanne Wood, but returned for the finale, where Hill absolutely blistered her to the tune of multiple 10-8 scores. After one more Octagon appearance in December 2015, where she was tapped out by Kailan Curran, Kagan has yet to fight again.
16. Angela Magana
Original Draft Position: 8 (No. 12 seed)Pre-TUF Record: 11-6
Post-TUF Record: 0-4 (0-3 UFC)
When there are three winless women vying for the bottom spot, it comes down to optics, and by the optics “Your Majesty” is the queen of the “TUF 20” basement. Magana was seeded 12th, which seems reasonable except for the fact that she came to the show on a two-fight losing streak. She got a bit of a raw deal in the elimination round, as she had Aisling Daly under control on the ground in the first round before being stood up out of back mount, but getting punched out in the second was all her. She made it to the finale only to run into the buzzsaw that was Torres, taking a lopsided unanimous decision loss.
In all, Magana’s professional career ended on six straight losses—officially. That number does not count the Daly loss (an exhibition) nor does it count getting snuffed by Cristiane Justino at a UFC fighter retreat after mocking the longtime champ’s looks on social media. Why she would choose to try and cyber-bully a much better fighter who happened to outweigh her by 30 pounds, and whom she was likely to encounter in person, is anyone’s guess, but that she chose to do so using a photograph of “Cris Cyborg” making a charity visit to a children’s hospital is 100% on brand for both women.
More
