Randy Couture signs with Bellator

El Guapo!

Not as a fighter though!

Randy Couture, former multi-division UFC champion, has reportedly signed a long-term deal with Spike TV and will work closely with Bellator Fighting Championships, including as a coach on their new reality series.

Shortly after 11 a.m. ET a press e-mail came out with an announcement that there would be a conference call with Spike TV and Randy Couture on February 5. Obviously with Spike, the home of Bellator, and Couture, an MMA legend, it didn't take a significant amount of imagination to see where this was going.

But Loretta Hunt at Sports Illustrated broke the news a few moments later:

SI.com has confirmed through multiple sources that UFC Hall of Famer Randy Couture has signed into a multi-year deal with Spike TV, a property of Viacom, to appear in multiple projects for the cable channel, as well as other possible ventures within the media conglomerate's family of networks.

As a part of the multi-faceted agreement, Couture's first role will be as a coach in the forthcoming Bellator MMA reality Series, which begins shooting in February and airs later this year.

I'm sure there will be many more details to come, but it will also be interesting to get the UFC reaction to the news.

Randy and the UFC have had some rocky history, but they remain closely tied together. While the UFC has not been overly aggressive with Bellator -- Eddie Alvarez situation not withstanding -- it will be intriguing to see if they take offense to one of the biggest stars in their history going to help out Bellator on Spike, which Dana somewhat famously recently called "Spuke TV."

We'll have more details as they become available. But for now it looks like Randy's new home is with Bellator on Spike TV.

It'll be interesting to see what he'll be doing with Bellator, but ill be mainly looking forward to whatever reality show they come up with. Hopefully it's something decent.
Bellator seem to be getting bigger and more popular by the day. With a bit of luck, they'll get a TV deal over this side of the water so we can watch their events too.

riffmongous

Yeah its interesting to see where Bellator are going, their ratings since they moved to Spike were around 930,000 and then 830,000 for the first 2 shows iirc, not too bad if you compare them to some of the UFC non Fox events but we'll need a few more events to see where the ratings level off. The tournament format is going to become more popular with 'hardcore' fans i think as the UFCs seems to becoming more and more money driven towards title fights now (sonnen fight, Silvas refusal to fight weidmann)