Craig Jones recently made an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience alongside the man he has been coaching under on the latest season of the Ultimate Fighter, Alexander Volkanovski, and the pair explained the chain events that very nearly ended up with him being fired from the show. As with any season of TUF, there’s always pranks played between the teams and a rivalry tends to ensue (sometimes friendly, sometimes not). As Jones explains it though, one of the pranks that he pulled on Ortega was something that the producers deemed unacceptable, and put his job on the show at risk:
“He [Ortega] definitely wasn’t a fan of me by the end of the show, actually I almost got fired for one of the pranks i played on him… We had to take five COVID tests a week, so obviously there’s pranks on the show… This won’t make the TV show anyway, but I did pretend to put his COVID test in my ass… the mouth swab. That was a dream, it didn’t really happen”
“It’s pretty lighthearted. I wouldn’t really stick his oral COVID swab up my ass.”
Then, when showing Rogan and the viewers the clip of him pretending to do it, he added:
“They actually almost fired me for this one, so i broke across the line a little too much… I did have some ideas for some COVID pranks but they did tell me, since they spent so much money on COVID testing, that’s just a line we can’t cross. But… I just couldn’t resist… all our test were sitting in the same section.”
Alongside his pranks, Jones did also make the announcement that he was going to challenge his opposite number on Ortega’s team, Rener Gracie, to a grappling match on the show. As the show isn’t released until June 1st, it remains to be seen whether he was able to make this happen. Craig Jones also elaborates on some of the other pranks that both he and Volkanovski played on Brian Ortega during their time on the show, although the rest were at least ones that The Ultimate Fighter production team weren’t angry enough to get him fired over:
“We pretended to take his car…He’s like, ‘if he touches the car, I will fight him.'”
The full episode of the Joe Rogan Experience can be found on spotify, but the below excerpt was uploaded directly to the official YouTube channel for the popular podcast:
