TUF Talks: The Ultimate Fighter Season 13 Final Episode

Hello once more fans and friends and welcome to the very final “TUF Talks” of “The Ultimate Fighter” Season 13! For nine straight weeks, we’ve lived and learned with a new cast of hopefuls lead by two of the UFC’s biggest Heavyweight stars, Brock Lesnar and Junior dos Santos. And now it’s time for it all to end: with both semi-final fights featured, it all comes down to this. So let’s dive right in with the latest edition of my recap/reaction hybrid “TUF Talks”.

The episode soon picks up where last week’s episode left off: it’s the morning after Tony Ferguson’s now-notorious tirade. For those who didn’t see last week’s episode or simply need a refresher, Ferguson got insanely drunk and then picked a fight. No punches were thrown, but Ferguson crossed a major, major, major line when he insulted Charlie Rader and brought up his personal issues with his child.

As expected, that doesn’t sit well with… everyone. No one, not even Ferguson’s own teammates, offer him any support. Chuck O’Neill, who is scheduled to fight Ferguson later this episode, remarks “A drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts.”

Ferguson tries to apologize for his actions, saying that he blacked out and doesn’t remember what was said. The response is near-universal: like it or not, you’re an exile now. Ferguson sums up how he feels pretty well: this isn’t the first time he’s been left all by himself, and none of this is going to matter inside of the cage.

Speaking of the cage, we then almost-immediately cut to the first scheduled fight of the night. After some mandatory pre-fight hype and footage from the weigh-ins, it’s now time for Ramsey Nijem to fight Chris Cope.

Ramsey Nijem is one of the season’s most interesting characters. He’s wild and crazy, his nickname was “Stripper Ramsey”, but he continues to shine in the Octagon. Nijem is the real deal, and spends much of this two-round fight picking Cope apart. Cope lands a few times, but he absorbs so much punishment that he eventually goes down in the second round. The referee has to pull a dominant, screaming, and scary-looking Ramsey Nijem off of Cope, giving Nijem the second-round TKO.

After the typical post-fight reactions, we then get more pre-fight hype for the next fight of the episode. And now it’s time for the last fight of the thirteenth season of “The Ultimate Fighter”: Anthony Ferguson vs. Chuck O’Neill.

This fight was an all-out war, with both men beating each other near-senseless. It is easily one of the best fights of the season, you could make a serious case for it being “the” fight of the season actually. Both men have a technical striking war for the first round, but Ferguson begins to assert himself with crippling leg kicks in the second. In the third, the combined punches and leg kicks have left Chuck O’Neill bruised, bloody, and barely standing. A final salvo sends O’Neill crashing to the mat, with Ferguson scoring a third-round TKO.

To end the season, we get everyone’s reactions to Anthony Ferguson and Ramsey Nijem fighting in the finals. Junior dos Santos remarks that when you’re a good person, good things happen to you, so of course he’s pulling for Ramsey. Most of Team Lesnar remarks that they’ve still got no love for Ferguson and they hope Nijem wins. Even Lesnar seems to admit that Ferguson has personal problems, but thinks that his outstanding skills in the cage more than make up for them. Nijem says that he’s going to live the dream despite being a little bizarre, Ferguson promises that no man is going to beat him and that no personal problems will define him.

This was definitely the best episode of “The Ultimate Fighter” Season 13. It featured two good-to-great fights and a great amount of really impactful drama. The fallout of Tony Ferguson’s tirade was one of the best moments of the season, in terms of pure drama. The fights themselves both saw dramatic finishes. If Season 13 began the way it ended, we would’ve had an entirely different season on our hands. This was a really good episode.