UFC President Dana White finally came out and said what we were all thinking near the end of this week's episode of "The Ultimate Fighter": Quinton "Rampage" Jackson may actually rival Ken Shamrock as worst coach in the history of the show.
While this development is not altogether surprising, even a guy like me – who's always been fairly critical of Jackson over the years – has to admit that this season of the UFC's popular reality show is getting pretty hard to watch. Through a series of awful coaching decisions Jackson's put himself in a 0-5 hole to opposing coach Rashad Evans and unless something drastic and unforeseen happens soon, there's no reason to think Team Rampage won't up and get swept in the show's opening round.
For anybody keeping score, that would be a first for "The Ultimate Fighter."
And it's not just that Jackson has turned out to be a terrible coach that makes this season so painful to watch, either. It's that those of us viewing at home have to suffer through his disastrous showing as an instructor and his painfully forced trash talk with Evans with the full knowledge that just a few months after taping wrapped on "TUF" season 10, Jackson retired from MMA to pursue his movie career.
Now, I'm already on the record saying Jackson will be back in the cage someday, but we have to at least consider the possibility that the slow, morose death march Team Rampage is currently slogging through on "The Ultimate Fighter" may actually be the fighter's swan song in the world of MMA.
Now that would be a real shame.
Almost from the word go, Rampage's performance on "The Ultimate Fighter" had tragedy written all over it. From his unhealthy (unholy?) fascinating with street brawler Kimbo Slice, to the fact that Jackson brought Tiki Ghosn and Hector "Sick Dog" Ramirez with him as assistant coaches while Evans brought Mike Van Arsdale and Trevor Wittman from the highly respected Greg Jackson camp, it all spelled trouble for Rampage and the young charges unlucky enough to wind up on his team.
What started badly – with embarrassing losses from Abe Wagner and Wes Shivers – got even worse when teacher's pet Slice got beat down by Roy "Big Country" Nelson two weeks ago. But on the last couple episodes of "The Ultimate Fighter," the wheels have completely come off and it has become clear that Rampage has given up on the whole idea of coaching his team.
After his team's most recent painful-looking defeats, from Demico Rogers and Wes Sims, Jackson hasn't even cared enough to enter the cage to check to see if his fighters are OK. Instead he sits Octagon-side bemoaning his own rotten luck.
On the last episode, Evans finally confronted Jackson about the perceived lack of concern for the members of his team. Jackson did little to retort, saying only that he wasn't a coach and he wasn't a doctor. As if there were any question about either of those points. Evans then called Jackson selfish and as if to prove his point, Rampage stormed off, saying he had to go address his team.
"Where you going?" Evans called after him. "It's not like you're gonna teach them nothing."
This week Jackson responded on his blog, making the same old excuses we always hear from reality TV villains about biased editing and misunderstandings. But all the reactionary griping in the world can't wash away the obvious poor performance captured by the cameras – not to mention the confirmations from nearly everybody else involved on the show that Jackson made a bad coach.
Perhaps Jackson really will return some day. Maybe he will even fight Evans to settle the score of the animosity that clearly existed between them during the show's taping. Until then, our last memory of the once proud fighter is as a guy who couldn't even be bothered to try to compete on "The Ultimate Fighter."
It's a disappointing epitaph on a great career. Nobody wants to think of Jackson as another Shamrock.
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