Tate on Rousey: Her Poor Coaching Hurt Her Fighters Chances

The Ultimate Fighter Season 18 coach, Miesha Tate has a weekly blog going on over at Yahoo Sports! and this week she details what she believes are the coaching mistakes made by her rival, Ronda Rousey.

Check it out:
On the last episode of The Ultimate Fighter, my friend and No. 1 pick Julianna Pena defeated my rival coach Ronda Rousey’s No. 1 pick – and probably a lot of people’s pick to win the female tournament – in Shayna Baszler.

What I didn’t know was that while I was preparing Julianna to fight the fight of her life, Ronda was filling Shayna’s head with weakness. When you go into a fight expecting it to be easy – and then you find it isn’t easy – you aren’t prepared mentally.

Julie hit Shayna really hard right away. That’s what I told her she had to do. A lot of people who fight Shayna do the pitty-patty feeling-out sTUFf because they respect what Shayna has done in her career so much. Bryan and I knew that Julianna needed to start fast and not allow Shayna to use her experience to slow things down and start looking to capitalize on any mistakes.

Julie had to go out there and be first, to hit her hard and shock Shayna out of any idea that Julie didn’t belong in there with her.

As you saw it was a great fight, and Julie not only won but subbed Shayna in the second round. Julie had to overcome some bad moments, but she was fully prepared to have things not go her way for a time, to get hurt, to be put in bad positions, and to fight through those situations. My fighter was prepared to fight, Ronda’s wasn’t.

Shayna, from what I saw, showed up to walk through someone she had no respect for. For Ronda to encourage her fighter to go in there expecting an easy time is basically instilling mental weakness in her.