Lesnar, Dos Santos to Coach Season 13 of ‘The Ultimate Fighter’

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Ending months of speculation, UFC President Dana White today revealed that former UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar and top prospect Junior dos Santos will coach the upcoming 13th season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” after which they will square off to determine the heavyweight division’s No. 1 contender.

“These two will coach, and then they’ll fight, and the winner will fight [UFC heavyweight champion] Cain Velasquez when he’s healthy,” White said during a media conference call to promote the UFC’s Jan. 22 UFC “Fight for the Troops 2” event.

In late December, it was reported that Velasquez would be sidelined for six to eight months with a torn right rotator cuff which required surgery. White said that the UFC’s original plan was to match Velasquez against dos Santos at UFC 129 on April 30 in Toronto, but that the “TUF” idea simply fell into place after learning of Velasquez’s injury.

“It made all the sense in the world once we knew how long Cain was gonna be out,” said White, who stressed that no interim title would be created in the champion’s absence.

“I literally hadn’t made any phone calls yet and we hadn’t contacted anybody about coaching... I was driving to work one morning and I thought, ‘You know what? That makes sense. Let’s see if we can do this.’”

Filming for the series is set to begin in the last week of January, with the season premiering March 30 on Spike TV. The latest iteration of the UFC’s long-running reality television series will feature a cast comprised solely of 170-pound competitors. Welterweights have previously been featured in the show’s second, fourth, sixth and ninth seasons, which yielded current UFC fighters Joe Stevenson, Matt Serra, Mac Danzig and James Wilks, respectively.

The season’s tournament winner will be crowned at the “TUF 13” live finale, which MMAJunkie.com reports will take place on June 4 at The Pearl at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

No date was announced for the bout between the heavyweight coaches, but White said that Lesnar and dos Santos would “definitely, 100 percent” meet at a June UFC pay-per-view event. UFC 131 is rumored to take place on June 11 -- one week after after the finale -- at Rogers Arena in Vancouver.

Lesnar was handed the second loss of his nascent MMA career by Velasquez in October, when he had his belt taken in a brutal first-round TKO loss at UFC 121. Prior to that match, the former pro-wrestling star had rattled off four straight wins, including stoppages of such UFC luminaries as Randy Couture and Frank Mir.

One of the heavyweight divisions brightest prospects, dos Santos is undefeated in his six Octagon outings. After bursting onto the scene with a knockout of Fabricio Werdum in his UFC debut, the 26-year-old “Cigano” tore through Stefan Struve, Mirko Filipovic, Gilbert Yvel and Gabriel Gonzaga, stopping all four with punches. Dos Santos went the distance for the first time in his career last August, when he took a unanimous decision over Roy Nelson to become the No. 1 heavyweight contender.