It’s official: Conor McGregor and Urijah Faber are your TUF 22 coaches. UFC president Dana White announced during the TUF 21 Finale that McGregor will take on Faber as the head coaches of TUF 22: U.S.A. vs. Europe. McGregor will head a team of eight European fighters while Faber will lead eight American fighters to glory. Unlike most TUF coaches, however, McGregor and Faber will not fight each other. Personally, I am not a fan of this. I just don’t understand it. If McGregor and Faber aren’t fighting each other, why are they the coaches? Why isn’t Jose Aldo coaching against McGregor instead? After all, they are the respective UFC featherweight and UFC interim featherweight champions, so I’m confused. If the UFC wanted to put McGregor on TUF, fine, I get it for ratings. But why isn’t it against Aldo? Why Faber, who he is not fighting? TUF has a bad history of having the coaches never fight, and although McGregor isn’t going to fight Faber anyways, just having the Irishman coach the show concerns me. I don’t want to say the show is “cursed,” because that can’t be proven, but as far as history shows, the majority of TUF coaches — as of late, anyways — end up getting injured, and I really, really hope McGregor and/or Faber do not get hurt. Aldo too, for that matter. Had McGregor lost to Chad Mendes at UFC 189, I would have understood this TUF pairing, but he beat him, earning the interim title in the process. That’s why I just don’t get it, and why I don’t like it. I just feel like the UFC could have used Aldo instead of Faber in this role and the ratings would be just as good. And considering they are supposed to fight soon, that made more sense to me. So I’m just scratching my head at why they did this. All I can say is, hopefully McGregor and/or Faber don’t get hurt during the filming of the show, and hopefully Aldo is ready to come back in time to fight McGregor. That fight is rumored to take place in early January. So hopefully everything work out and we see McGregor take on Aldo, because that’s what we want to see.
