Dear UFC, please stop putting TUF Finale fights on the main card

Erick Montano and Enrique Marin

About 11 p.m. on Saturday night, Joe Rogan showed up on my TV to furrow his eyebrows and make his case for the upcoming main event.

That case was, as usual, an urgent one, brimming with superlatives and broad, sweeping statements. Clearly, one of the most important things happening anywhere in the sporting world was about to happen on FOX Sports 1, just as the scheduled UFC Fight Night 78 broadcast was supposed to be wrapping up.

The fight itself wasn’t quite that monumental, but thanks to Neil Magny and Kelvin Gastelum, it was a pretty good main event.

It was exciting, lots of fun, with some violent plot twists and plenty of high-quality combat-sports action. If you stayed up until almost 2 o’clock in the morning on the East Coast to watch it, you were treated to quite a show. If you didn’t, I don’t blame you one bit.

We’ve said it before on this website: The UFC has a pacing problem with these cable-TV fight cards. But this time, at least for this event, there’s an easy fix staring us right in the face.

It’s those “Ultimate Fighter” tournament-final fights, you guys. They don’t have to disappear, but they can’t stay here on the main card.

Enrique Barzola

Saturday night’s event featured two of them. In the lightweight final of “The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America 2,” Enrique Barzola defeated Henrique Gutierrez via unanimous decision, while in the welterweight final, Erick Montano squeaked out a split-decision win over Enrique Marin after three rounds of very little action.

If you knew who any of these four people were before this event, congratulations, you are as hardcore as an MMA fan can get.

But, really, that’s kind of my point. If you knew and/or cared enough about “TUF: Latin America 2” to feel personally invested in how the finals turned out, you probably would have found those fights wherever the UFC put them.

That seemed to be the thinking when, a week before this event, those two fights were slated for the UFC Fight Pass prelim portion of the card. That way, those who cared could still watch, and the local crowd in Monterrey, Mexico, could still get some closure on the reality show competition that they may or may not have actually watched.

That was a good plan, a sensible one. Then that changed in the days before the event, and suddenly the main card was clogged with roughly an hour’s worth of material focused on UFC newcomers most fans didn’t know and won’t remember.

About 40 minutes into the broadcast, we got the first “TUF” finalist video package, attempting to introduce us to the principals of the upcoming bouts. A little more than an hour later, the last TUF Finale bout concluded. Almost 80 minutes after the “TUF” stuff began, the broadcast finally returned to real UFC fights, as Henry Cejudo and Jussier Formiga stepped into the cage.

Do you know what you could do in 80 minutes? You could watch the entirety of “This Is Spinal Tap.” Those old “Twilight Zone” episodes you DVR’d during the last marathon? You could watch three of them if you skipped through the commercials, which, of course you would.

If you stuck with the live UFC broadcast, however, you’d watch the same UFC 194 ad with Jose Aldo and Conor McGregor until you bled from your eyes and spoke in an Irish brogue.

But probably you didn’t stick with that live broadcast all the way. Probably you watched or did something else, telling yourself you’d come back later for the fights that mattered. And maybe you did. Then again, maybe you didn’t. Which makes you wonder why the people in the business of broadcasting live fights on TV can’t make it any easier to watch live fights on TV.

The solution is simple, really. You want to stick these TUF Finale fights on a UFC card? Put them on the prelims. It doesn’t even have to be the deep prelims, the ones on UFC Fight Pass. It could be fodder for the actual TV prelims, and that’d be fine.

You know why? Because their very name acknowledges that the prelims are not what we came to see. It’s the stuff before the stuff that matters. Put whatever you want on there. If we don’t like it, it’s our fault for tuning in early.

But the main card, that should be relatively free from filler. On a cable-TV UFC Fight Night card, it should be four fights, five at the most. It should wrap up in less than three hours, creating a tidy, manageable live TV viewing experience. You know, like most major sports.

By all means, UFC, have all the “Ultimate Fighter” seasons you want. But recognize that it’s been a long, long time since Griffin-Bonnar I. These finale fights are no longer must-see TV, and they haven’t been for some time now.

The fans who still care can find them on the prelims. And if you get a pleasant surprise and one of those fights turns out to be great, sure, let us know, and we’ll check it out.

Otherwise, please get these long, drawn-out audition tapes out of the way so we can enjoy the main event before Saturday turns into Sunday. It really does seem like so much to ask.

For more on UFC Fight Night 78, check out the UFC Events section of the site.