Xavier: They went on, like, hour rants. Coach [Jason] Parillo was getting on our ass. ‘I’ve had world champions and world champions spar all the time hard, you all should have no trouble sparring.’ We were all just looking at each other. But Bisping made a good point, I will not lie. We all told him we never spar on fight week, but he said, ‘Yes, OK. But you’ve also never been on The Ultimate Fighter. So then we were like, ‘Fair.’ Still, you’re hard sparring and you fight literally in a few days.
The intensity, they showed a little bit [on the episode], but it was hard sparring. They were like, ‘Everybody go light,’ but no, it was hard sparring. They were pushing us super hard, everybody’s getting banged up. I’m pretty sure some stuff happened where people got hurt and stuff, so then they realized, ‘Oh shit, maybe we need to tone back on the hard sparring.’ I mean, we could have avoided this if you just kind of listened to us, but I understand. We’re his team, we’re f*cking down 0-2. Bisping, he’s super competitive, which I love for him, but at the same time he’s taking it out on us. So he’s like, ‘F*ck it, we’re hard sparring. We’re training hard all the time.’ We’re going to get a win somewhere. It doesn’t matter where we get the win, we’re going to get a win somewhere.
