5 best seasons in the history of The Ultimate Fighter

#3 Season 1: Team Couture vs. Team Liddell

The inaugural season of TUF helped to launch the UFC into the mainstream

If you rewatch the inaugural season of TUF today, you’d see a show that largely looks like the product of its time – this was of course prior to the UFC taking off as a mainstream entertainment entity, and so a lot of the season was dedicated to showing exactly how much hard work the fighters had to put in to even make it to the pre-UFC level. But somehow, the cast had enough personality – and forged enough rivalries – to make the whole thing as watchable as any other reality show.

There were storylines all over the place – the bullying of the hapless Jason Thacker, who suffered the indignity of having Chris Leben “spritz” his bed; the weight cutting struggles of Bobby Southworth; the ankle injury suffered by the cast’s surrogate father figure Nate Quarry; and the sheer eccentricity of eventual Middleweight winner Diego Sanchez.

And of course, that’s not even mentioning the rivalry that grew between Leben and the partnership of Southworth and Josh Koscheck. The now-legendary incident that saw Leben punch his way through a door to attempt to confront them led to one of the biggest ratings draws in the show’s history when he faced Koscheck in the following episode – and while the fight turned into a damp squib, anyone who was watching by that point was hooked.

We’ve all heard the stories of how the fight at the finale between Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin saved the UFC, but equal credit could easily be given to all of the fighters on the cast of this season, as it was them who hooked everyone in, to begin with. The fact that 8 of the 16 cast members went onto genuine success in the Octagon for years later says it all. This wasn’t just a great season of TUF, it was a great reality show, period.