Rampage I love you, but you’re a horrible coach.
Yea I know that if I ever said this to Rampage’s face I’d get my a** kicked but I still feel this needs to be said. After the recent loss of Team Rampage’s Demico Rogers to Team Rashad’s Brendan Schaub on TUF last night, I was forced to take a closer look at Rampage’s track record when it comes to TUF results. If you combine all the results of all the fighters that Rampage has coached from both TUF7 and TUF 10, his win loss record is 3-13. 3 AND 13!!!!!! Seriously Rampage, WTF? You are one of the best fighters in the game and you’re meaning to tell me that you can’t even eek out a coaching record that’s even close to 500? I guess not. So the question is why does it seem that being on Rampage’s team puts you in a pretty good position to lose? Well there are a couple theories.
The first is that Rampage really doesn’t know how to pick a solid team. Now I am not an MMA fighter nor have I ever coached a team, so I obviously can’t say that I could do any better and I am not saying that I could pick better. However, when we look at Rampage’s team especially on this season, it seems that Rampage instead of picking well rounded fighters he just picks the biggest and baddest fighters that he can get thinking he should be able to hammer out wins on brute strength alone. In my opinion your picks should be strategic and thought out relative to the picks that Rashad makes, that way you have a relative idea as to how you want the matches to play out. This is especially true if you have the first two picks as Rampage had.
The next thing is the match-ups that Rampage sets up when he does have control. I will give him that his fight pick in TUF 7 was fine. Gerald Harris was clearly the favorite over Amir Sadollah and on the outside it appears to be a safe pick. It just so happened that Amir was a freak of nature and was able to beat Gerald. So I’ll give Rampage that one. However, the other two picks he made in the beginning of TUF 10 was a bit suspect. First he put Abe against Madsen. Madsen was Rashad’s best wrestler and Abe did not have good ground game. So why in the world would he pick that as a match? It was then no surprise that Madsen won by controlling the ground and gashing Abe’s head enough to see the skull. Then he picked Wes to fight James. Once again i think Rampage has this mentality that size will win overall while completely ignoring skill and endurance. During the training sessions it was clear that Wes wasn’t 100%, and his match proved that.
The icing on the cake for me is Rampage’s overall behavior toward his team. Take last night’s episode for example. Brendan comes into the ready room greeted by all his coaches and all members of his team. The get ready on time, giving constant advice and practice. When Brendan walked into that room he walked into a winning atmosphere. They felt like a winning team so they acted like a winning team. When Demico walked in to his ready room. Nothing. He was greeted by Scott Junk. The other fighters and coaches were MIA for various reasons. While Brendan was getting great prep, Demico was sitting around waiting trying to figure out what to do next. Now to be fair this is reality TV and editing could have been done to make it look like Team Rampage doesn’t give a f***. However, the footage I did see did not sit well with me. If Rampage wants to win then he has to act like a winner, but he doesn’t. I think he is letting his frustration get to him and just letting his fighters fly on their own thinking they are able to take care of themselves. Then when Demico lost the entire team was MIA. When Kimbo lost he couldn’t get ENOUGH attention. It does appear that Rampage does like to play favorites and that’s not the mark of a good coach.
Granted I could be wrong. It could all just be that the fighters on Rampage’s team both past and present are just not as good as other fighters on other teams. It could also be that Rampage is just not that good at picking fights. It could also be that it’s just TV editing giving us the wrong idea. I could be, but I don’t think it is. The evidence is mounting up beyond a reasonable doubt that while Rampage is a great fighter and great personality, he is a horrible f***ing coach.
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