It was recently announced that the next season of The Ultimate Fighter was going to star Conor McGregor and Michael Chandler as opposing coaches, and now Gordon Ryan has offered to serve as a grappling coach on the show too. Although he didn’t offer his services to either man specifically, it seems far more likely that he would be working alongside Chandler as opposed to McGregor. After all, McGregor has always been associated with Dillon Danis and he would almost certainly be his first choice as grappling coach on the upcoming season.
Given that Danis and Ryan have had an adversarial history over the years, this could also make for pretty interesting viewing for grappling fans. Of course, nothing is official yet and neither coach has taken up Gordon Ryan on his offer to help their teams on The Ultimate Fighter at the time of writing. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility though, and Ryan would be following in the footsteps of his mentor John Danaher, who served as a grappling coach for Georges St-Pierre‘s team on the show. Not only that, but Ryan’s former teammate and friend Craig Jones was the grappling coach for Alexander Volkanovski’s team when the show aired in 2021.
Gordon Ryan shared a promotional image for the upcoming season of The Ultimate Fighter starring Conor McGregor and Michael Chandler in a post to his official Instagram account, hinting that he would be available to serve as a coach on the season.
His post obviously attracted several comments, most notably from fellow experienced grappler and MMA fighter AJ Agazarm:
“hahaha are you implying that they use you? maybe for cleaning the mats your “jiu jitsu” would get absolutely destroyed in an mma fight and that’s a fact you poser”
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Agazarm would take the opportunity to take a shot at Ryan either, as they have gone back and forth on social media several times in the past. Outside of that though, the rest of the response to Ryan’s offer was overwhelmingly positive and the fans seem to be behind him.
