One fight away: Dreams tested, reality delivered on the brutal gauntlet of ‘Dana White’s Contender Series’

As flyweights Lone’er Kavanagh and An Tuan Ho prepared to kick off Season 8 of “Dana White’s Contender Series” last Tuesday night, both laid out remarkably similar expectations for themselves.

Both were undefeated professional fighters. Both had identical 6-0 records in MMA. Both were there to earn a spot in the UFC and make their dreams come true. Each man explained all this to us, the viewer, over B-roll footage of him hitting heavy bags and performing various feats of athleticism inside an empty gym.

“I think I belong here because I’ve put in the work, I’ve sacrificed a lot of things, and this is what I was meant to do,” Ho said during his pre-fight video montage. “To fight in the UFC is going to fulfill all the goals that I’ve made, all the dreams I’ve dreamt of, all the visions I saw when I was a kid. That’s going to mean a lot to me.”

As Ho underwent his final check before stepping into the cage, UFC commentator Laura Sanko observed that based on his prior fights, Ho was “UFC-ready right now.”

“You could plug and play him into that flyweight division so easily and he would do really well,” Sanko said.

And for about the first two minutes of his fight with Kavanagh, this did seem to be the case. Ho looked fast and sharp in the striking exchanges, at one point landing a clean right hand on the decorated kickboxer Kavanagh.

Midway through the opening round, Kavanagh landed a perfectly timed left hook, knocking Ho unconscious before he hit the mat.

Experienced viewers of this show didn’t need to be told what all of this meant. Kavanagh launched into a brief celebration inside the cage before quickly locating UFC president Dana White cageside and walking over to offer a bow. White scribbled on his notes and later held them up for Kavanagh to see, a post-fight report that was only two words long: “Holy s***.”

That sealed it. Kavanagh would be rewarded for this win with a standard entry-level UFC contract. Ho would essentially disappear from view as soon as he was revived and helped out of the cage.

This is how it works on “Dana White’s Contender Series” (often shortened to the Contender Series or simply DWCS). Two fighters enter the cage. One wins and the other loses. But just winning isn’t enough. Fighters must win and look good enough doing it to impress White, along with UFC matchmakers Sean Shelby and Mick Maynard. They find out whether or not they hit that amorphous goal at the end of each episode, as White announces their fates one at a time on the live broadcast.

More and more, this is how fighters find their way into the UFC. Launched in 2017 as additional content for the UFC’s streaming platform, UFC Fight Pass, DWCS is now the main conduit for MMA fighters hoping to compete in the sport’s biggest promotion.

In fact, the Season 8 broadcast began with a surprising statistic to drive home this fact. As explained by play-by-play commentator Dan Hellie, nearly one-third of the current UFC roster got a spot with the fight promotion via DWCS.

“That’s such a crazy stat,” replied Sanko, a former professional fighter herself who’s gradually become one of the UFC’s most beloved commentators. “It’s so cool to see how this show has blossomed into a machine that feeds talent right into the UFC.”

However, not everyone agrees on exactly how cool this is. A frequent criticism of DWCS is that it locks fighters into low-paying contracts by funneling them through a UFC entry portal that gives them little chance to negotiate. In the first season of DWCS, reported payouts were as low as $5,000 to show, with winners earning an additional $5,000.

There are plenty of fans and media members who are quick to point out that while the show might be selling viewers on the promise of life-changing dreams coming true, it’s rewarding fighters with four-fight contracts that essentially pay the UFC version of minimum wage.

Still, when you talk to fighters, managers, and coaches, you get the sense that however imperfect a path the Contender Series might be, many have accepted it as the best option available.

As longtime MMA manager Daniel Rubenstein put it, as much as people might like to complain about the money on DWCS, it’s still an instant and meaningful pay raise for fighters who’ve been competing on the regional circuit.

“These days, if you get signed directly to the UFC, you’re probably starting out at ($10,000 to show and $10,000 to win) anyway,” Rubenstein said. “If you get signed off Contenders, you’re also getting 10 and 10. But to fight on Contenders, for most of these guys it’s probably more than double what they make to fight anywhere else. I’ve got a guy fighting for a title in LFA (Legacy Fighting Alliance) and he’s making $2,250 – and he’s got to pay his own medicals.”

Audie Attar, who represents UFC star Conor McGregor, among others, argued that the chance to fight on a platform that fans actually watch and media consistently report on is itself a benefit that’s hard to find elsewhere in the MMA space.

“I think the Contender Series and programs that allow fighters to earn their way into a top promotion, plus get the platform to build brand equity, is a good thing,” Attar said. “Fighters could get to a mid-major promotion like LFA or Cage Warriors, then test free agency as they move up to a more prominent promotion. It provides another path for fighters, and it’s good for the (UFC) since it’s not only a feeder program but also creates more programming assets.”

If you ask UFC president Dana White, he’ll tell you that DWCS is “the best show on television.” Matter of fact, he’ll say that even if you don’t ask, sometimes more than once per episode.

“If there was enough young, up-and-coming talent out there, I wish we could do this every Tuesday for 52 weeks a year,” White said. “I love this show so much. … If you’re a fight fan, literally even have this much of a fight fan in you, it’s the best show on television, period, end of story.”

It’s also a familiar format for longtime UFC fans, and a successful one for White in particular. Back in the early 2000s when the UFC was struggling to gain a foothold somewhere — anywhere — in the media landscape, this was the type of show that saved the company.

“The Ultimate Fighter,” a reality show that debuted in 2005, promised viewers a chance to watch MMA fighters in two different weight classes as they fought their way through a tournament that would reward the winners with “six-figure UFC contracts.” This culminated in a live finale that drew big ratings on Spike TV. That platform helped the UFC go from a struggling money pit to a wildly profitable sports organization.

Of course, the two winners of that first season — Forrest Griffin and Diego Sanchez — weren’t the only ones to receive UFC contracts. And as viewers later learned, a six-figure contract could mean a lot of different things. Still, the premise excited people. There were only so many spots available, and only the victors would enjoy the spoils.

DWCS essentially makes the same pitch to viewers, except without all the tired reality TV show cliches to sit through first. Instead of one fight per episode, taped well in advance and presented only after a heavily edited narrative has laid the groundwork, you get five fights aired live, with relatively minimal filler.

According to White, the UFC continues churning out seasons of “The Ultimate Fighter” (TUF for short) in addition to DWCS because the two shows offer different things. While TUF is a 24/7 “pressure cooker” that gradually tells each fighter’s story, DWCS provides more action and immediate consequences with far less backstory.

“I have no idea who’s on the show tonight,” White told Yahoo Sports prior to the Season 8 premiere. “I don’t want to know anything about these guys, what they’ve done before, who they trained with. I don’t know until we get there. There’s a little book in front of me and I get to see and write my notes. These guys have to come in and I don’t care what you did before, show me right here, right now who you are. So we end up getting unbelievable fights. You get two different types of results from the fighters that go through these two different experiences, and both are good.”

DWCS serves several different purposes for the UFC as a company. For one, it’s a relatively cheap source of content. Costs stay low in part because the fighters on this show come cheap, adding up to a total payout that’s a fraction of the average UFC event. But it’s also economically efficient due to the fact that the entire production takes place in the UFC’s own Apex venue.

This is especially convenient on the production side of things, according to Craig Borsari, the UFC’s chief content officer and executive producer.

“From a production perspective, (the UFC Apex) allowed us to produce it without having to roll up a mobile unit and configure that truck so that we’re able to do remote production out of a mobile unit,” Borsari said. “It’s set to our standards, it’s bespoke for the way we produce our live events. So it became more plug and play, which is just a massive advantage in terms of efficiency in the way we approach producing the shows.”

There’s also another advantage to having a tier of programming just below the UFC. While matchmakers might be using DWCS shows to assess fighting talent, Borsari pointed out, the production team is also using it as a tryout tool of its own.

“This is completely a selfish perspective, but the Contender Series, similar to the athletes, provides a chance for the production team to evaluate talent on our crew,” Borsari said. “So somebody like Laura Sanko, there really wasn’t room for her to come into our show on the Fight Night or pay-per-view level. We weren’t looking for another reporter. We needed one for Contender Series that gave her an opportunity, Dan Hellie on play-by-play, (ring announcer) Justin Bernard. It gave us, on the production side, a very similar platform for talent to come in and see who would be a good fit for us. And now look where Laura is. I mean, it’s like she got the contract at the end of the Contender Series and she’s now in the big show.”

Beyond the goal of talent acquisition on a budget, the show also gives the UFC another way to churn out hours of content for broadcast partners.

That’s especially helpful for a platform like ESPN+, which began as a new streaming service in desperate need of new programming to fill out its library. The UFC now has several shows — TUF, DWCS, the “Road to the UFC” tournament meant to find and promote fighters in Asia — that add up to hours and hours of low-cost programming.

All of these offer basically the same concept to viewers: watch these lower-level fighters, most of whom you’ve never heard of, pummel each other just for the opportunity to sign one of the lowest-paying contracts offered by the UFC.

This used to be a niche mostly filled by smaller fight promotions, some of which made it their stated goal to be a feeder league for the UFC. Many of those organizations have come and gone during the UFC’s long rise to dominance over the MMA space. One that has stubbornly remained is King of the Cage, which started as a regional promotion and has since promoted events across the U.S. and internationally.

Terry Trebilcock founded King of the Cage in 1998, and watched as it launched the careers of fighters like Urijah Faber, “Rampage” Jackson, and Sean Strickland. While Trebilcock has always fervently resisted the “regional” description, his promotion has established itself in part on being a place to see tomorrow’s UFC stars today.

While he doesn’t think the Contender Series hurts his business, he said, it does seem to him like the UFC’s attempt to own even more of the sport.

“If fighters are competing in a show like ours or like LFA, and (the UFC) is now saying that they need to go through an additional step like fighting in the Contender Series in order to make it to the UFC, that’s basically trying to create an additional gap between what these shows are doing and what the UFC is doing,” Trebilcock said. “I’ve always felt that on my regular pro shows, there are pretty much always three or four fights that would fit right in on any UFC Fight Night card and you wouldn’t notice a difference in quality. What you see now is them saying basically, even if you’re an elite in any show outside of ours, we might have to put you in a Contender Series fight just to prove that you’re capable of competing. I think it’s a perception they’re trying to create more than anything.”

One of the ways that Trebilcock has noticed the downstream effects of the Contender Series, he said, is in what happens to fighters who compete there and don’t earn a UFC contract. The talent for the Contender Series comes from smaller fight promotions like his. But if a fighter tries to make the jump too soon and loses, the smaller shows might not necessarily welcome them back.

“We don’t usually pick guys up like that,” Trebilcock said. “Occasionally it could happen if we just needed a fight. But really, when guys can’t compete in the Contender Series, I can’t go to TV people and tell them we have the best guys on the card that aren’t fighting in the UFC if they’ve already seen that these guys went to the Contender Series and didn’t win. How do I sell that when I’m trying to highlight the difference between us and some local show?”

This is another criticism of the Contender Series from those within the MMA industry. As Xtreme Couture head coach Eric Nicksick put it, there are times when fighters think they’re ready for the level of competition but might not fully understand the true stakes.

“I personally like the format, but 5-0 and (going) to the UFC can also be a trap,” Nicksick said. “I remember 12-0 guys that weren’t getting signed.”

That sentiment was echoed by Rubenstein, who said that fighters who underperform on the show may be “literally kissing their careers goodbye.” So much is dependent on not only winning this one fight, but also on looking good doing it.

Many fighters who went on to have great UFC careers lost in their first fight with the organization. And while it does happen that fighters get UFC contracts even after a loss, the Contender Series isn’t known for giving too many second chances.

“Michael Lombardo, when he was on there, he won but just didn’t win impressively,” Rubenstein said. “And (UFC matchmaker) Sean (Shelby) has told me, literally don’t ever talk to me about him again. I’ll never sign him. So that one fight had a really negative impact on his career even though he won.”

As the UFC is quick to highlight, the Contender Series has produced some notable success stories. The biggest star to come off the show so far is current UFC bantamweight champion Sean O’Malley, who became a known man in the sport virtually overnight after knocking out his opponent in the first round back in 2017.

O’Malley looks back now on the move from small shows to the UFC with a stop in the Contender Series as the “perfect transition” in his career. The platform also allowed him to connect with fans and show off his personality in a way that set him up for success later on in the UFC.

But O’Malley also wasn’t hampered by the standard four-fight contract the way some other fighters have been, he added.

“I think I was in a very unique position, because I feel like I was able to renegotiate pretty much after every fight for the first three, four, five fights,” O’Malley said. “I would go out there and do what I do, put on a performance, and then I was able to renegotiate. But even still, it’s like you start off at ($10,000 to show and $10,000 to win). It’s not like I was renegotiating going straight to ($50,000 and $50,000). You renegotiate, but you also extend your contract. So it depends what your goal is. My goal was never to really leave the UFC, so I didn’t really mind extending the contract.”

O’Malley also got to gradually work his way up the ranks in the UFC, which is not always the case for every fighter in every weight class. Many Contender Series fighters don’t even stick around in the UFC long enough to see the end of that first four-fight contract, which the UFC can terminate at any time.

Still, O’Malley said, if a teammate had offers to take his chances on the Contender Series or sign with a UFC competitor like the PFL, he knows what he’d say.

“What’s the PFL? That’s what I’d ask him,” O’Malley said. “Like, ultimately where do you want to be? The UFC is the platform. I was making twice as much money from brand deals and stuff as I was making from the UFC early in my career, and it was because of the platform that the UFC gave me to grow my social media.”

Of course, not every Contender Series opportunity is created equally. UFC middleweight Caio Borralho got his shot in 2021, and won a unanimous decision victory that White found unconvincing.

He was still limping around on crutches when his manager called and told him that the matchmaker would give him another crack at the Contender Series if he was willing to fight less than a month after that first bout — and in a higher weight class.

A loss could have been a disaster. MMA promoters and fans aren’t known for being overly sympathetic about fights taken under difficult circumstances. The second time, Borralho said, he was focused on impressing White rather than on simply winning the fight. And when he did finally get a contract after winning via first-round knockout, the end result might have been even better for him because of the disappointment from the first fight.

“People actually got to know my story from that,” Borralho said. “They were like, ‘Oh this is the guy that won the first time but didn’t get the contract.’ They’d say, ‘I think he deserves the contract, but let’s see how it goes in this one.’ So more people came to know me, to know my story after this. If I was going straight from a show in Brazil, where I was champion, right into the UFC, I wouldn’t get that many people to know my story.”

Now Borralho has renegotiated that starter contract several times, he said, with more money from each one. On Saturday, he fights Jared Cannonier in the main event of UFC Vegas 96 inside the Apex. All of it, he insists, developed much faster than it otherwise would have had he not gained a following on the Contender Series.

But there have been other notable examples of fighters who didn’t get that second chance. Chief among them is Brendan Loughnane, who dominated Bill Algeo in a Contender Series bout in 2019, but wasn’t offered a contract because White didn’t like his decision to go for a takedown late in the fight.

Yahoo Sports combat contributing writer

Algeo would later sign with the UFC, where he fought most recently just last month. Loughnane rode the attention and fan sympathy to a contract with the PFL, where he later won the $1 million prize as the 2022 champion. It didn’t take long for fans to speculate on exactly how many UFC fights he would have had to win in order to equal that amount, especially after starting out on a Contender Series contract.

According to White, missing out on the occasional fighter who goes on to great success elsewhere is simply part of the process.

“Listen, if you’re another promoter — LFA, Bellator, One (Championship), or any of these other guys — the guys that I don’t take on the Contender Series that have this type of popularity? You should sign them immediately,” White said. “I mean, this is a great opportunity whether I sign you or I don’t sign you.”

But as some managers and coaches have pointed out, those opportunities to fight elsewhere aren’t so plentiful anymore. Bellator hasn’t been adding many fighters since it was purchased by the PFL. And the PFL largely does its signings all at once to fill out each new season’s roster.

The Contender Series, on the other hand, runs for 10 weeks at a time and might sign anywhere from three to five fighters per week. For those trying to make it big in MMA, this is where the opportunity is. It’s just that, if you don’t perform well in your one shot to impress the boss, there might not ever be a second.