(Photo via MMAFighting.com)

Earlier today, Spike TV and Bellator executives and former two-division UFC world champion Randy Couture hosted a media conference call to give more details about the two television projects “The Natural” will be involved with as part of his multi-year agreement with the cable network and rising fight organization.

The first, titled Fight Master: Bellator MMA will be a reality television fight competition show, reminiscent of the one Spike famously created with the UFC back in 2005, which also featured Couture as a coach on its first season. This time around, Couture will serve as a coach along with Frank Shamrock, Greg Jackson and Bellator fighter Joe Warren. Thirty-two welterweight contestants will vie for a spot in the Fight Master house, and sixteen will make it in to compete for $100,000 and a slot in a future Bellator tournament.

Spike and Bellator say that Fight Master: Bellator MMA will tape in the fall of 2013 and that the show will feature more fighter choice and autonomy than in past shows of this type. The Emmy award-winning Bertram van Munster and Elise Doganieri, who created The Amazing Race will serve as the show’s executive producers.

Spike and Bellator also announced a second reality show that Couture will be a part of. MMA Rescue will feature Couture using “his years of expertise in the business of mixed martial arts to help turn struggling gyms into thriving enterprises.” That’s actually new ground for MMA programming and sounds pretty cool, as far as we’re concerned. Fight fans who have, for years, been subjected to watching restaurants, bars, tattoo shops, and hair salons get turned around will now get their very own version of the business rescue reality-show format.

(Go on. Ask him if he gives a f*ck.)

The odds of Randy Couture getting a cushy no-show desk job with the UFC have officially dropped to zero. In the wake of Couture accepting a position to be the new superstar face of Spike TV and Bellator, UFC president Dana White tore into the Natural, blasting his lack of loyalty and even questioning his character as a human being. Here’s what DW had to say about it yesterday:

“I’ll say my peace on Randy Couture, and after today, I’ll never mention him again. The bottom-line is this: When that whole thing went down with Randy years ago, we weren’t on the best of terms. Now, before that happened, Randy Couture was on the Matt Hughes, Chuck Liddell deal. He was getting a salary, he was in with the company, he was one of those guys. Then he tries to do all this stuff, pull all this bullshit with Affliction, loses and comes back. So, it took me a long time to warm up to him. His lawyer, who I can’t stand, calling our lawyer every day, saying, ‘We want to come back, we want that job again, we want to work for the UFC,’ and all this stuff. Finally, I just say, ‘yes,’ and give him the FOX [commentary] deal…

(Bellator’s new MMA competition show unveils its wrestling coach and “swag advisor.” / Photo via Getty)

UFC legend Randy Couture — who helped usher the UFC into the mainstream as a coach on the first season of The Ultimate Fighter in 2005 — will be returning to his Spike TV stomping grounds this year. Except this time, it’ll be in the service of a different MMA promotion looking to build their own brand on the guy-centric cable channel. No, this is not going to sit well with You Know Who. SI.com’s Loretta Hunt has the details:

SI.com has confirmed through multiple sources that UFC Hall of Famer Randy Couture has signed into a multi-year deal with Spike TV, a property of Viacom, to appear in multiple projects for the cable channel, as well as other possible ventures within the media conglomerate’s family of networks.

As a part of the multi-faceted agreement, Couture’s first role will be as a coach in the forthcoming Bellator MMA reality series, which begins shooting in February and airs later this year.

Spike TV will unveil this industry-shifting announcement on Feb. 5 during a press conference in Los Angeles, where Couture and Spike TV president Kevin Kay will discuss details of the agreement and what the 49-year-old retired fighter’s role will be on the Bellator series and possibly other Spike-broadcasted projects. The series is expected to feature a number of current and up-and-coming Bellator fighters.

(Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.)

First and foremost, we have to thank CP reader Walter Cardenas, who passed along the news (or lack thereof) regarding the much anticipated Spike TV/K-1 deal that was set to kick off in late 2012. And unfortunately, those of you who were looking forward to seeing the Japanese promotion both stateside and on a semi-major network in 2013 are in for some bad news, because according to multiple sources, the deal has already been killed. For starters, the promotion’s webpage on Spike.com is blank. And in less speculative news, Spike TV president Kevin Kay stated the following in an interview with MMAFighting:

We’re probably not going to move forward and continue with K-1. It was a little bit of an experiment. Those guys are great. We’re trying to figure out our kickboxing plans. It did okay. It was a digital play (K-1 aired on Spike.com late 2012). There are other things we can do in the kickboxing spectrum.

News of K-1′s demise (you know, their fourth or so in the past few years) started way back in July of 2012, when promotion insiders declared that the event they had targeted for the end of December at the Madison Square Garden would be “unfeasible.”

(You see, kids, this is why we don’t break the fourth rule of Project Mayhem. Photo via Complex)

By Jason Moles

As is customary, nay tradition, around these parts, we’re hitting the eggnog early and often this week — thus, the obligatory Top 10 list to close out another year in the world of mixed martial arts. It’s not all fluff, though: Last year we predicted a champion would test positive for a banned substance and Brock Lesnar would retire. Not bad, huh? So grab a seat while we break out the crystal ball and see what 2013 has in store for us.

1.) Showtime stays in the MMA biz, will announce deal with Invicta FC and others.

MMA is just too popular to completely wash your hands of. Showtime may finally be done with Strikeforce, but that only means they’re now free to partner up with the likes of all-female Invicta FC or the World Series of Fighting, both of which could be looking for more permanent homes after their early success in 2012. Don’t let the Invicta PPV news fool you; they can’t win that battle. No matter who inks the deal, expect Showtime to counter-program at least one UFC event.

2.) A Ronda Rousey loss brings about the swift execution of women’s MMA in the UFC.

(Taffer my good man, you finally have some competition.)

In its seven-season history, Bellator’s events have bounced from Friday nights to Thursdays, to Saturdays, and back to Fridays again. That, coupled with the promotion’s changes in cable partners (anybody remember the ESPN Deportes days?) and its traveling-circus approach to event scheduling, may have worked against the organization gaining a foothold in the market over the years.

Luckily, Bellator’s impending Spike TV deal will give its events a sharp boost in exposure — and they’ll no longer be shown on a night that translates into guaranteed death for viewership numbers. MMAJunkie is reporting that Bellator’s first event of the Spike era is slated for Thursday, January 10th, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As Junkie wrote, the event will serve as Bellator 85, and will air on Spike TV following TNA Impact Wrestling.

Switching to Thursday nights can only be a good thing for Bellator, which has averaged just 168,700 viewers per broadcast this season on MTV2. Coincidentally, the UFC may be moving their own Friday-night cable show — The Ultimate Fighter — to a different night as well. Although Jon Jones’s manager Malki Kawa and UFC president Dana White both claimed recently that TUF was moving back to Wednesdays, FX’s Vice President of Media Relations told MMAFighting that such a move was “highly unlikely,” adding: “FX has not announced the official date or night that the next installment of TUF will air…The official announcement will be coming in the next two or three weeks.”

Bellator 85 will feature the winners of Spike TV’s “Vote for the Fight” fan poll — we already submitted a write-in vote for War Machine vs. Mika Tan’s Ex-Boyfriend II — but no matchups have been formally announced yet.

Update: The story just took a weird turn — now an unnamed Spike TV exec is saying that Bellator’s Thursday-night move isn’t official yet: “We are still deciding a few options, still looking at staying on Fridays or moving to the old TUF slot on Wednesdays.” Basically, the cable networks are playing a game of scheduling chicken. MMAFighting’s Dave Meltzer explains after the jump…

(Hey Bjorn, can you switch the big screen over to MTV 2? This fight is boring the shit out of meheywaitaminute!) 

You know, with all the talk of “fakeness”, “arrogance”, and “haters” that has utterly dominated any Jon Jones/UFC 151-related article we have posted since the infamous event occurred, perhaps we should be thankful that there are still a few guys out there who will tell it the way it is with little to no regard for their “brand,” their fanbase, or any fight promoters that might be interested in them. Honesty appears to be a fleeting quality in MMA fighters — and athletes in general — and is often swept under the rug in favor of the kind of politically correct, sponsor-gaining rhetoric that has been carbon-copied from athlete to athlete to the point of delirium. It’s an unfortunate side effect of a culture insistent on turning everyone who can throw a ball, a punch, or a kick into a “role model.”

So, like we said, maybe we should take more time to appreciate the select guys in the MMA biz who couldn’t care less about extravagance or endorsement in an ever-popularizing sport, and would rather just speak their mind when asked to do so. We’re referring of course, to Bellator welterweight champion Ben Askren, who has shown in the past that he gives not a shit what MMA fans, writers, or even certain UFC presidents think about his…let’s call it “routine” style of fighting.

Askren has seen his fair share of haters since exploding army-crawling onto the MMA scene back in 2009, mainly as a result of his seemingly carefree attitude in regards to finishing a fight. Although his record stands at a perfect 10-0, Askren has only finished two of his fights, and only one if you take into account that his submission victory over Ryan Thomas at Bellator 14 was the product of a referee blunder. Whereas most of Askren’s “lay-n-pray” counterparts would likely insist that they are at the minimum always looking for a finish in a fight that simply hasn’t present itself, Askren outwardly stated in an interview with MMAJunkie that he will probably never even look for a knockout in a fight no matter how long he is in the game.

OK, maybe honesty is an overrated quality.

Full story after the jump. 

(Oh yes. Oh God, yes. / Video via slafy)

In their continuing efforts to stick it to the UFC, Spike TV has inked a deal with world-reknowned kickboxing organization K-1 to broadcast four live events on Spike.com through the end of this year, and a series of live events on the cable channel in 2013. As K-1 CEO Doug Kaplan explained in a press release distributed yesterday afternoon, “Spike is the perfect television home and stage to introduce our K-1 warriors and the fast-paced, aggressive style of K-1 fighting to fight fans across America.” Spike’s K-1 broadcasts next year will complement their coverage of Bellator Fighting Championships, though air-dates and times for the 2013 shows have yet to be announced.

Rumors of K-1′s demise have plagued the promotion since last year, but an American showcase on a channel that reaches nearly 100 million viewers could resuscitate the brand. Could K-1 be a “gold mine” for Spike, as Joe Rogan once suggested? After the jump, the full text of the press release, including more details on this year’s Spike.com/K-1 broadcasts.

(Video courtesy of YouTube/StudioMMA)

An interesting quote from the interview above by our friends at StudioMMA got me thinking today whether or not the landmark TV deal the UFC struck with Fox is helping or hindering Zuffa’s bottom line.

According to UFC president Dana White, every day he deals with fans who say they had no idea that the UFC is broadcasting events on Fox and it’s affiliates like FX and Fuel TV.

“Our deal with Fox is seven years. Over the next two years we’re working our asses off to get this Fox deal dialed in… Fuel, FX and big Fox — as far as the production goes, as far as the type of programming we’re going to continue to put together, fine-tuning the Ultimate Fighter that’s live and reaching out and letting not only the hardcore fans, the sometimes fans and people who aren’t yet fans know that we’re on Fox. That’s a bigger job than people could imagine. How many people that I still talk to on Twitter that have no idea we are on FOX, FX or FUEL; oh, it’s crazy man. It’s crazy. So that’s what we’re going to be doing in the next two years.”

When SPIKE TV announced that it had hired onetime backyard brawler-turned UFC fighter Kimbo Slice to host the first instalment of its The Ultimate Fighter recap show, which will air opposite FX’s new live incarnation of the show, it looked like they may have briefly gotten the upper hand in the battle against their ex partners at Zuffa.

Leave it to Dana White and Co. to one-up the competition by trying to fuck them worse than they’ve ever been fucked before.

Somehow (okay, it was probably dollar signs and decimal points) FX convinced the gold grill-wearing Ultimate Fighter alumnus to cut a promo for TUF Live, convincing viewers to watch the new series, — a somewhat odd request, considering it runs at the same time as Kimbo’s “The Ultimate Fighter Fridays” premiere. In his defense, he could have filmed the spot before SPIKE hired him, but you would think he would have mentioned it to them beforehand to avoid looking like a fool, you know, more than he did bobbing all over shadowboxing while doing the promo.