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Professional sports has evolved way beyond the game itself. It's all about promotion, storylines, characters, and most importantly: grabbing up mainstream viewers. The NFL, NBA, MLB, a lot of their promotion revolves around developing storylines between the teams or promoting superstars so that casual viewers have more motivation to watch a game. While the superstars are good in their own right, the superstar treatment they get from the refs and the league make them role models and household names, which ultimately benefits the league.
TUF allows mainstream viewers to get interested in a sport that many still deem to be the barbaric version of boxing. So to showcase fighters and their training, it's a big help. Obviously they're trying to develop the talent they see into interesting characters (anyone notice how much face time Mac got in in TUF6?), but that makes fights more interesting to the avrage viewer.
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