Defending Tito and Chuck on TUF 11

It seems there is a great deal of backlash from Dana White’s announcement that the coaches for The Ultimate Fighter Season 11 would be Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. Frankly I don’t get it.

Season after season we’ve complained about the show because it has made us wait for huge fights. That’s not the case here. This time we will get Ortiz and Liddell on non-PPV TV in the TUF 11 Finale and the contest will have no bearing on the light heavyweight title picture.

Due to their recent struggles I can appreciate that not many fans are real excited for the match up, but let’s remember that it was less than four years ago when their rematch at UFC 66 became the first UFC PPV to break 1 million buys. Ortiz and Liddell are aging, but they’re still stars, maybe not as much with the hardcore fans, but the casuals know the names for sure.

It makes sense individually as well. Liddell is fresh off his stint on Dancing with the Stars and his name and image was seen by millions upon millions of people who are not MMA fans. At the time many of us talked of how this was great exposure for MMA and how it might, at least in some small way, help make the sport more acceptable. So doesn’t it make sense to put Chuck on an MMA TV show and see if he can draw some eyes that might stick around?

It makes sense for Tito because love him or hate him, he is charismatic and he was a tremendous coach on TUF Season 3. After the lackluster numbers at UFC 106, an event he headlined, he needs to wrangle up some fans and erase the lingering stigma of his inability to fight that was heaped on him by his boss Dana White when he left the promotion after UFC 84. It seems another season of TUF where he will surely shine, is the perfect way to go about it.

Finally, how many other options does the UFC have? I’d love to see Dan Hardy and Georges St. Pierre coach the show, or even Hardy and Josh Koscheck, but then we’d have to wait until June or July to see them fight. Anderson Silva and Vitor Belfort...nope doesn’t seem eye catching. Lyoto Machida and Mauricio Rua...again, not that appealing. Who else is there, who else would grab the attention without pushing potential title-altering fights back into the summer? And we all know the promotion is in desperate need of big-name title-altering fights over the next four to six months.

It’s Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell and I’m perfectly fine with it. When they touch them up in June I’ll be interested to see if Tito can finally beat Chuck or if he will be crumbled against the cage once again. Besides, it might be one of the last times we ever see either man fight, and they’re both MMA legends.