Paddy Pimblett calls for ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ season with Ilia Topuria: ‘A very interesting six weeks’

The Ultimate Fighter doesn’t have a lot of juice left in it, but Paddy Pimblett believes it’s still worth a squeeze.

“The Baddy” has fought twice in 2026, losing a hard-fought decision to Justin Gaethje for the interim lightweight title and then bouncing back with a 52 second submission of Benoit Saint Denis at UFC 329. The Gaethje loss has aged quite well. Pimblett made it to the final bell, which is more than Paddy’s rival Ilia Topuria can say. After the slick BSD win, Pimblett and Topuria are suddenly in the same orbit, and a fight between the two would be huge.

So huge, in Pimblett’s opinion, that it’d be worth an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter with the two as coaches.

“I have no fight booked at the minute, but I would love to fight Ilia Topuria,” Pimblett told Kolos MMA recently. “I’ll beat him that bad that I’d send him back down to featherweight. I think me and Ilia Topuria would be a brilliant season of The Ultimate Fighter because I’d get under his skin so much, that when we come into the fight, I’d beat him just as fast as McGregor beat Aldo.”

“The Ultimate Fighter would be a very entertaining six weeks to say the least if it was me and him.”

In a perfect world, the UFC would just book Pimblett and Topuria for a December fight. The bout is big enough already, and a Paddy vs. Ilia TUF season would be more for The Ultimate Fighter’s sake than the fight itself. Not even Conor McGregor could get people to tune into TUF. It’s sucked dry. Obsolete. Let it die.

If the UFC does decide to do a Paddy vs. Ilia TUF season (and never doubt that UFC CEO Dana White will always have a soft spot for the format that turned things around for the promotion), it could be a long, long time before we finally see the coaches fight. The show, as Pimblett mentioned, takes six weeks to film. Then it takes four to five months for the show to be put together. Then the show runs weekly for three months. That’s over 10 months to wait.

So if you want to see Ilia Topuria vs. Paddy Pimblett any time soon, pray to the MMA Gods that they don’t do a season of The Ultimate Fighter together.