Ronda Rousey’s next match will be as a member of UFC. (Robert Beck/SI)

MONTREAL — Ronda Rousey usually is the one doing the arm twisting. Did someone beat her at her own game to get her to finally comment on her job status?

“Okay I admit it … I’m officially a UFC fighter,” Rousey wrote on Twitter on Friday afternoon, after more than a week of steering clear of the subject of a TMZ.com report that she had become the first female fighter in the promotion’s history. “So excited! Can’t wait to debut! Let Dana White know who you want my first opponent to be!”

There’d been no arm twisting involved, actually, but White had beaten Rousey to the punch, so to speak. Earlier in the day he went on Jim Rome’s nationally syndicated radio program and confirmed what he, too, had been uncharacteristically silent about ever since the groundbreaking story broke. “Yes, it’s official,” he said in answer to Rome’s question about the TMZ report, which had been confirmed by other media outlets, but all citing anonymous sources. “Ronda Rousey did sign with the UFC.”

This official confirmation didn’t create much of a buzz at New Gas City, the cavernous downtown Montreal nightclub that was the venue for Friday’s UFC 154 weigh-ins. The place was packed and noisy, just as the UFC likes it, and what the fans saw was uneventful, with every fighter on the card making weight — also just as the UFC likes it. Georges St-Pierre, who defends his welterweight championship for the first time in 19 months in Saturday night’s main event, got a hero’s welcome in the city where he lives and trains. His opponent, interim champ Carlos Condit, received polite applause. The Rousey news, so widely considered a fait accompli after last week’s report, was not the least bit of a distraction.

Still, listening to the Rome show, it was cool to hear White make a public endorsement of women’s MMA, something he had said as recently as a year ago would never be a part of the UFC. It’s not too difficult to understand why Dana would have had a change of heart if you’ve ever seen Rousey fight.

“I tell you, this girl is nasty,” he told Rome. “She might be beautiful on the outside. She’s a Diaz brother on the inside. She’s a real fighter. She’s very talented. She has the credentials, the pedigree, I mean, everything.”

Everything? Dana was referring to more than Rousey’s Olympic bronze medal in judo, her Strikeforce women’s bantamweight championship and her 6-0 professional record, with every win by that unstoppable armbar, all but one in the very first minute. The UFC president is looking beyond all of that. “I think she has that ‘it’ factor,” he said. “I think she’s going to be a big superstar.”

Whether that happens falls as much on him and his promotional team, of course, as it does on the fighter. But so far Rousey and the UFC have been a marketable match, with “Rowdy Ronda” appearing everywhere from the cover of the ESPN the Magazine “Body Issue” to the Sports Illustrated TV magazine show on NBC Network.

The ultimate test, however, will come not on the newsstand, the TV screen or the Madison Avenue boardroom. It’ll come in the cage. No one has yet posed a threat to Rousey, and for the 25-year-old’s star to continue to rise she’s going to need to overcome some viable challenges. Cris “Cyborg” Santos, long the indomitable force in the women’s fight game, will be Rousey’s most treacherous hurdle once the Brazilian finishes her steroid suspension. Then the two fighters’ camps can get past their silly squabble over how to bridge the weight-class gap between the 145-pound Cyborg and Rousey, who began her career at 145 but now is champion among women 10 pounds lighter.

White offered no hint on when we’ll see a Rousey vs. Cyborg matchup. But he did insist that Rousey’s challenges will not end there. “She’s got four or five good fights,” he said during his radio appearance. “The next two years, we’ve got really good opponents for her, and it’s going to be interesting.”

It’s already interesting, considering that White’s dismissal of women’s MMA all along was centered on his insistence that there were not enough top-level women to fill a division. Rousey’s “four or five good fights” sounds like a UFC women’s division in the making.

—Jeff Wagenheim

Anderson Silva easily defeated Stephan Bonnar at UFC 153 last month in Rio. (Zumapress.com)

Anderson Silva plays with people.

The UFC middleweight champion has done it for years inside the octagon, most recently a month ago in Rio de Janeiro. He languished against the cage early in the main event that night as if lazing about on a street corner, arms at his side except to rev up the crowd of adoring countrymen by broadly gesturing for his opponent to hit him. No, to try to hit him. Then, after dodging every punch with nothing but a fluid rhythm of head and upper torso movement that would make a matador blush and a contortionist blanch, Silva apparently decided that he’d toyed enough with the musclebound man standing in front of him slinging hopeless leather. And with a single well-placed knee, he knocked the juice out of Stephan Bonnar. Show’s over, folks.

Outside the cage, Silva plays with all of us.

You were expecting “The Spider” to walk into the octagon Saturday night in Montreal, if Georges St-Pierre wins the UFC 154 main event, and publicly challenge the welterweight champion to a superfight, right? He’s going to be at the Bell Centre, we know. And UFC president Dana White is on record as saying, “He wants [GSP] to win this fight, and he wants to fight him after.” Asked directly if Silva will challenge St-Pierre in the octagon post-fight, the UFC president answered, “I would say yes.”

But Silva says no. “Not in my character to stand up and challenge anyone,” he told Tatame in a story posted Monday on the Brazilian magazine’s website. “I think that this will not happen.” He laughed and added, “I think not, I’m sure.” (Translation from Portuguese is from online sources.)

We might be inclined to chalk up this about-face letdown to the fight promoter with the mostest. During his conference call with MMA media last week, White made it sound like the octagon challenge was a fait accompli. But does he really need to use a phony Silva call-out to help sell the first St-Pierre fight in more than a year and a half? No, he doesn’t. It might well be that Dana simply knew that Silva was going to be in the building and put two and two together.

Well, here’s another set of numbers for White’s abacus: two zero one three.

Silva revealed in the same Brazilian interview that he does not intend to fight again until the end of 2013. White had been expecting to be able to put Silva back in the cage much sooner than that — perhaps against GSP in Cowboys Stadium outside Dallas.

“I think it’s time for me to leave my life in order, because this thing of always being worried and having work, I just leave my personal life aside,” Silva told Tatame. “I have my projects, my personal plans and will keep them moving forward.”

While grinding the middleweight division to a halt?

Or maybe just putting Dana White through the grinder. Silva knows what Dana told the media and understands how much a superfight with St-Pierre would mean to the UFC. Perhaps this is simply his dramatic way of letting it be known that he won’t come cheap.

We know Silva likes to play with people. Maybe he plays them, too.

—Jeff Wagenheim

Georges St-Pierre (left) is returning to the cage for the first time in 20 months. [Al Bello/ Zuffa LLC via Getty Images]

“We missed him,” said Dana White, the words spoken with a hint of longing. “It’s good to have him back.”

The UFC president was speaking of his company’s most lucrative pay-per-view draw, welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre, who is indeed back after 20 months away from the octagon because of knee surgery and the rehab that followed. White was so thrilled that GSP is ready to fight again, in fact, that he assembled MMA reporters on Wednesday afternoon to hype the superfight between St-Pierre and middleweight champ Anderson Silva.

No, wait, the media conference call was actually about Georges’ bout against interim champion Carlos Condit a week from Saturday in the main event of UFC 154 in Montreal. At least that’s what the press release said the call was going to be about.

As things turned out, though, the session came as close to being an announcement of GSP vs. Silva as the fight promotion could muster without issuing an official poster.

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Chael Sonnen (right) was last seen getting dominated by Anderson Silva at the main event of UFC 148. (Donald Miralle/Getty Images)

Remember that fake UFC championship belt a mischievous Chael Sonnen used to sling over his shoulder for press conferences and television appearances in the contentious leadup to his July rematch with Anderson Silva? You know, the one that he impishly told an interviewer on ESPN was proof that he was the real middleweight champion?

Well, let’s pull it out of the closet and dust it off. That plastic-and-pleather strap is the one that rightfully ought to be put up for grabs next April 27 when Sonnen challenges once again for the UFC championship. This time at light heavyweight, though.

Seriously?

Yep, this is not another Chael media ploy. The UFC actually announced on Tuesday that Sonnen, who has competed in the fight promotion’s 205-pound weight class exactly one time — and that was seven years ago and he lost — will challenge Jon Jones after the two serve as coaches on the 17^th season of The Ultimate Fighter.

Jones need not bother to bring along the shiny brass-and-leather belt that he’s been proudly wearing for the last 19 months, the one he acquired by knocking out a champion and in the time since has defended against four former titlists. That belt signifies something earned, something extraordinary, something real. So “Bones” should leave it home in the trophy case. When he steps into the octagon next spring to take on a middleweight fighter with a heavyweight mouth, the fake plastic belt will suffice for the fake title defense.

That is not to deny that the next several months will be a lot of laughs. Chael is at this very moment locked in a windowless room with a team of joke writers brainstorming a Top 10 list for Letterman and five minutes of couch chatter for Leno.

And there’s no doubt that Dana White and Co. will benefit from this arrangement, which first was reported by The Los Angeles Times and later was confirmed by the UFC. The Ultimate Fighter will get a much-needed boost in ratings, and that springtime pay-per-view, featuring two of the organization’s top draws, is sure to do big numbers.

Maybe that’s good enough for the UFC: a financial boon generated by a dud of a fight.

Yes, a dud.

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Jon Jones denied responsibility for UFC 151′s cancellation. (ZUMPRESS.com)

TORONTO — The dance begins with one fighter walking out onto the stage, stripping down to his skivvies and stepping onto the scale. When his weight is announced, he flexes for the crowd, then moves off to the side and dresses while his opponent walks out, strips, weighs in, flexes, dresses. The two meet at center stage, face to face, fists up, striking a combative pose for the cameras. And after a dozen shutter clicks they’re done, off to rehydrate. Next set of fighters, please?

There may be no element of a mixed martial arts event more choreographed than the weigh-ins.

So how did light heavyweight champion Jon Jones end up having an off-the-script moment Friday afternoon after stepping off the scale?

It came about when Jones found himself staring into the eyes of not one but two people ready to go face to face with him. One was Vitor Belfort, who’ll be his opponent in the main event of UFC 152 on Saturday night at the Air Canada Centre (10 p.m. ET, PPV). The other was Dana White.

The UFC president and his 205-pound megastar had been sparring verbally for weeks, ever since Jones, upon being notified nine days prior to UFC 151 that challenger Dan Henderson was injured, turned down replacement opponent Chael Sonnen. The UFC ended up cancelling the Sept. 1 event — a first in the 11 years White has been running the show — and a fired-up White went on the offensive, calling Jones “selfish and disgusting” and his trainer/adviser/guru, Greg Jackson, “a [expletive] sport killer.”

As this weekend’s event neared, with Jones having been added to the top of the bill, he and White indicated that they would meet face to face here in Toronto to clear the air. The meeting was to take place just prior to the weigh-ins. So all eyes were on Jones as he stepped off the scale. Would he and White shake hands or even embrace, an indication that the cold war was over? Or would an icy chill pervade the stage set up atop a hockey rink at the old Maple Leaf Gardens, telling us that Dana might not have renewed his membership in the Jonny Bones Fan Club?

What we saw instead from Jones was an uncharacteristic moment of uncertainty. This phenom fighter who never hesitates to attack inside the octagon seemed to waver when he spotted White. Then he smiled, White smiled, even Belfort smiled, and the choreography resumed.

What did it all mean? It meant that Jones and White had not yet met. They apparently planned to do so a few minutes later. And say what? “None of your business,” White responded when asked that very question in a Fuel TV interview following the weigh-ins.

We can at least surmise that the discussion explored areas of disagreement. A case in point: At a Thursday press conference, Jones spoke respectfully of the boss — “Dana White is awesome, man” — but steered clear of accepting responsibility for the UFC 151 fiasco. “I have actually zero power to cancel an event,” he said. “When I was actually talking to Dana and [UFC chairman/CEO] Lorenzo [Fertitta] about accepting the Chael Sonnen fight, they never told me if I didn’t accept the fight that they were going to cancel the event.”

It would have been interesting to hear White respond to that, but he was absent from the press conference, laid up at his hotel with an episode of Ménière’s disease. But in the Fuel TV interview, Dana had his say. “I don’t think he would have said that if I was there,” said White. “So today we’re going to be face to face and we’ll see what he says and what he doesn’t say. The fact that he says that he didn’t know that the show would get cancelled is false. I did tell him that the show would be cancelled.”

And with that, White headed off to a windowless room with his light heavyweight champ. And then? Nothing. Nada. Not a word. (OK, chief, you can deactivate the Cone of Silence now.) My colleague from Yahoo! Sports, Kevin Iole, texted White to ask about the meeting and got this terse text back: “It went well.” Other than that, White, who posts his thoughts on Twitter about as often as he takes a breath, has gone quiet. So has Jones, unless we can read something into his only post-meeting tweet, a quote attributed to Michael Jordan: “Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.”

So stay tuned. Like any long-running soap opera, there’s always another episode to come.

—Jeff Wagenheim

When Cowboys Stadium opened three years ago, Jerry Jones envisioned it as a grand showcase for champions. That’s a promise still unfulfilled by his NFL team, which has but one wild-card win in the $1.3 billion facility and missed the playoffs the last two seasons. But the domed stadium in Arlington, Texas, might very well soon have championships on display. Two of them.

Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre, the UFC champs at middleweight and welterweight, respectively, appear headed on a collision course deep in the heart of Texas.

Nothing is official, and nothing will be until after St-Pierre makes his return from knee surgery and fights Carlos Condit at UFC 154 on Nov. 17 in Montreal. But UFC president Dana White acknowledged on Tuesday night that if GSP handles business against Condit, a superfight with Silva likely would be next.

“These guys want to fight each other now,” White said during an extended interview on the Fuel TV show UFC Tonight. “If you’re a fighter and you’ve dominated as long as Anderson has, and you’ve been great as long as Georges has, you finally want to say, ‘I want to test myself. I think I can beat this guy.’”

Though Silva vs. St-Pierre is hypothetical at this point, White has given the matter enough thought to specify that the champions of his 185- and 170-pound weight classes would meet somewhere in the middle, likely at 180 pounds, and that the fight would take place at Cowboys Stadium. The facility seats 80,000 for football but has a capacity of 110,000, including standing room. A 2010 boxing match between Manny Pacquiao and Joshua Clottey drew 51,000.

Silva (32-4) is coming off a July TKO win over Chael Sonnen, his 16th straight victory and 10th title defense. St-Pierre (22-2) has won nine straight and defended his belt six times, but has not fought since an April 2011 unanimous decision over Jake Shields. He was training for a Condit fight when he injured his knee last December, requiring surgery.

So GSP is going from sitting on the shelf to jumping into perhaps the biggest fight in UFC history? Said White, “I think we’re pretty close.”

–Jeff Wagenheim

Jon Jones (left) and Anderson Silva are friends, but Silva will root against Jones at UFC 152. [Jason Merritt/Getty Images]

So we’re finally going to see Anderson Silva going against Jon Jones.

No, the UFC middleweight and light heavyweight champions, the No. 1 and No. 2 fighters in every mixed martial arts pound-for-pound ranking outside of Georges St-Pierre’s parents’ house, have not agreed to square off inside the octagon. They doused the rising fan groundswell for a superfight a couple of months ago by basically walking arm-in-arm singing “You’ve Got a Friend” in two-part harmony.

But while “Bones” is too close of a friend for Silva to fight, Jon is apparently not so tight of an amigo that “The Spider” refuses to root against the guy. Amigo is “friend” in Portuguese, which is the language of Brazil, where Silva is from. And where Jones’ next opponent, Vitor Belfort, is from.

“As a Brazilian, I’ll be rooting for the Brazilian, even though I have a very good friendship with Jon Jones,” Silva said when asked about the UFC 152 title fight during an appearance on the Brazilian television show Bem, Amigos! (there’s that “friend” word again) earlier this week. “Whenever I’m with [Jones], I ask him to conduct his career in a different way, because he is very young and is always asking me something. But I’ll be rooting for Brazil, yes. May the best man win, but I’m rooting for Brazil.”

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Anderson Silva earned a fifth-round submission of Chael Sonnen during their first meeting back in August 2010. (Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images)

Chael Sonnen had to have been smiling on his end of the phone line.

Isn’t the whole point of trash talking to get your opponent off his game? Yet for the nearly two years since he came closer than anyone in the UFC to beating Anderson Silva, as he threw every insult from “absolute fraud” to “dirtbag” at the middleweight champion, he saw not the slightest crack in the armor. Even after a rematch was announced and Chael ramped up his antagonism, “The Spider” remained hazily soft-spoken, his affect teetering between blasé and bored. That had to be killing Sonnen.

Until Monday afternoon, that is, when a whole different Silva showed up on a conference call with members of the media who’ll be covering UFC 148 a week from Saturday in Las Vegas.

“First of all, Chael is a criminal,” Silva said in response to the first mention of his opponent, speaking in Portuguese that then was translated by his manager, Ed Soares. “He’s been convicted of crimes. He doesn’t deserve to be inside of the octagon. When the time comes and the time is right, I’m going to break his face and break every one of the teeth in his mouth.”

Well, well.

And there was more. Each time Sonnen’s name was mentioned, Silva became more graphic in his pitiless forecast. He promised “to beat his ass like he’s never been beaten before” …
beat him “the way his parents should have beat him to teach him some manners” … “beat him out of the UFC.” It was as if Silva was aping Sonnen’s mean-spirited standup routine, the longest-running comedy act in MMA. So Anderson, how bad is the beating going to be? “He’s going to have to go see a plastic surgeon after the fight.” Ba-da-boom.

As Silva went on, the words sounding so uncharacteristic, I found myself wondering whether he was really just talking about how the weather is lovely these days in Rio, and Soares was translating it as a Sonnen-is-a-dead-man threat in order to boost pay-per-view sales. But several Brazilian journalists took to Twitter to assure us monolinguals that the manager actually had softened what Silva was saying.

Reaction to Silva’s pitbull act puzzled me. The pervasive theme on Twitter and even in some media accounts was this: Boy, are you in for it now, Chael. I don’t get it. Anderson Silva became the deadly fighter he is by being patient, elusive and impassive until it’s time to strike. That is, by being himself. Maybe he’s capable of morphing into a José Aldo-style aggressor and being even more of a killer. If so, Sonnen is in trouble. But it’s reasonable to think that Anderson fighting angry is not Anderson at his best.

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A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Dana White moments after the season finale of The Ultimate Fighter: Live had just wrapped up. As the production crew was packing up cameras and lights in the vast Las Vegas gym, the UFC president mused on what he loved about this season — the reality show’s first on FX — more than any of the previous 15.

“Live,” he said. “There’s no putting it in the can. There’s no keeping it a secret. … Live is the real deal. I love it. This is the most engaged I’ve been in a season of The Ultimate Fighter in a long time.”

Well, White is going to have to find something new to engage him. Next season the show will revert to the taped format that, prior to this season, had been used ever since TUF launched on Spike back in 2005, he told Yahoo! Sports on Tuesday night.

The other TUF news White passed along has to do with something he wished were changing but will not be: The show will remain in its Friday 10 p.m. ET time slot. During our recent conversation, Dana said he understood why the Fox network initially had put the fighting show on Fridays — the UFC deal was completed after programmers had settled on much of their season schedule — but was hoping to move it to a better slot for next season. “Friday nights are a bad night for us. We know that,” said White. “We would never go out and air a show that we really cared about on Friday night.”

Why is that? Friday is not a popular night for television viewing. Indeed, although Fox officials have lauded the viewership numbers and White told Yahoo the show “was a smash hit home run for them,” other observers have dwelled on a ratings dip. However, it’s tricky to compare this season of TUF to past ones: FX is available in more households than Spike, but Fridays are a graveyard compared to the old Wednesday time slot. Suffice to say ratings numbers can be manipulated to tell whatever story you want to tell.

And so can reality television … at least when it’s, as Dana says, “in the can.” Whereas past seasons have been edited to feature reality TV fodder — pranks and spats in the house where 16 fighters were cooped up for several weeks of no TV, no phone, no outside world — this season was mostly centered upon the live fights. There was the real-life drama of fighter Michael Chiesa losing his father to leukemia in the show’s first week, an ongoing story line that built to the finale, when Chiesa became the show’s winner. But we didn’t see a lot of the old Jersey Shore-style hijinx.

Maybe FX wants more of that. Or maybe it simply wants the show to end on time (several weeks this season the live fights pushed TUF past its allotted hour). Whatever the case may be, White is at least publicly upbeat, expressing a willingness to accommodate his fight promotion’s broadcast partner for Season 16, which debuts in September, featuring welterweights. But the UFC president surely will be watching closely — even if the show is not live, as he prefers — and if “this next season isn’t up to the standards I expect,” he told Yahoo, “they promised me we can move it to Tuesday or Wednesday.”

—Jeff Wagenheim  

LAS VEGAS — Out of nowhere, as if a mirage here in the Nevada desert, it suddenly appears in front of my eyes: the huge garage door bearing a UFC logo, an iconic scene-setting symbol for so many seasons of The Ultimate Fighter. And when I say “out of nowhere,” I mean it. My cabbie probably thought he was being set up for a mugging when I directed him to turn into this desolate industrial complex a half-mile west of the neon glow of The Strip.

Back when I flagged down the cab and climbed in, I’d told the driver I was headed to the UFC gym. “Which one?” he asked. “There’s the Wanderlei Silva gym. There’s the Randy Couture gym.” He clearly was reasonably versed in MMA, which I suppose is par for the course if you’re taxiing people around the fight capital of the world. But the TUF gym was a new one for him. He’s found his way, though, and when we pull up in front of the familiar garage door and he notices a security crew milling around next to a satellite-equipped TV truck, he turns to me for his fare and says, “Don’t get beat up.”

Good plan. So as I walk past the security guys I refrain from any wisecracks, although I really want to ask someone why a building full of high-level mixed martial artists needs a security detail. Can’t these guys in black T-shirts go protect Penn and Gillette from the Blue Man Group or something?

I’ve come here to witness Friday night’s two semifinals of the The Ultimate Fighter: Live. I’m in town for Saturday’s UFC 146 anyway, so I thought it would be an interesting way to spend the evening before the big heavyweight card. It turns out I’m not alone in thinking that way. Between a few other members of the MMA media and a bunch of TV folks, fighters’ friends and assorted hangers-on, about 30 of us are led into the gym and seated octagon-side. As the production crew prepares for lights, camera, action, we sit sipping our complementary bottles of UFC label bottled water — talk about drinking the Kool-Aid — and gazing around at the vast walls adorned with larger-than-life portraits of UFC royalty from Royce Gracie to Randy Couture to Anderson Silva.

So what’s it like behind the scenes? I’ve signed a release form, so I can’t reveal any of the darkly scandalous stuff. But I do see Jon Anik, the FX show’s consummate professional of a host, being asked to record a retake of a voice-over at his Spalding Gray desk at cageside after a producer decides the script uses the word “also” one too many times. Also, also, also, I see Herb Dean walk in the gym, wearing his familiar all-black referee garb, and do something I’ve never seen him do in the octagon: reach into his pocket for his cellphone and answer a call. (I’m sure he’ll turn off the cell before the fights begin, and that reminds me to do the same with mine.)

Just before the show goes live, UFC president Dana White comes over to our little section of visitor seating, shakes a few hands and welcomes us all by saying, “Don’t be shy. You can clap, you can cheer, you can scream.” Toto, we’re not in the press box anymore.

I don’t do any cheering once the fighting begins, and most of those seated near me, even the non-media types, are pretty quiet as well. That puts this experience in stark contrast to the usual setting for a UFC fight. Rather than a 20,000-seat arena with a blood-thirsty crowd drowning out the ear-splitting hardcore house music, we’re in a quiet gym. Quiet, that is, all but for the cacophony of encouragement/instruction/cautions/cheers that are incessantly flying at the fighters from their coaches and teammates. Michael Chiesa’s corner is right in front of us, and here’s what we hear from his coach, Urijah Faber, from his other cornermen and from the blue-shirted bleachers of Team Faber. Moveyourhead!throwakick!twomoreminutes! It’s impossible to make sense of any of it.

But after a slow start against James Vick, Chiesa gets a thunderous takedown in the second round, ends up in full mount and explodes on Vick with a swarm of fists until Herb Dean (no cellphone in sight) jumps in and ends it. Or should we say he continues it. By winning the fight, Chiesa extends the most emotionally gripping feel-good/feel-sad story of the reality show’s season. The 24-year-old out of Spokane, Wa., lost his father during the first week of the show, but encouraged by his family back home, he continued on. And now he’s in the final.

Against a teammate.

Al Iaquinta makes it a sweep over Dominick Cruz’s team by taking a clear decision from Vinc Pichel, sending the Faber gang into wild celebration complete with an “ole! ole ole ole!” cheer.

The celebration is mostly for the fight they’ve just witnessed, no doubt, but some measure of these young men’s joint excitement has to be for the fact that they’re all finally moving out of the TUF house. With no phones, no TV, no nothing for weeks, this has been their sensory depravation chamber. Now they’re free to catch up on all the episodes of The Bachelorette that they missed. Or perhaps find some mischief — knowing full well, of course, that not only Chiessa and Iaquinta but every guy from the show who’s not medically suspended will be fighting Friday night in The Ultimate Fighter 15 Finale (10 p.m. ET, FX).

With that in mind, Dana White plays dad, sending the fighters out of the nest with a few words of advice. “Have fun tonight,” he says. “Do what you have to do. But be smart.”

–Jeff Wagenheim