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The 2025 UFC Hall of Fame class has its first inductee.
The promotion announced Saturday during its UFC 311 broadcast that veteran television producer Craig Piligian will be inducted into the Contributor Wing of the UFC Hall of Fame during International Fight Week later this year, with a date still to be determined. Piligian is best known to fight fans as the executive producer of the long-running reality TV program The Ultimate Fighter.
Watch video of the announcement below.
Piligian, 67, was one of the driving forces behind the creation of TUF, a show that is widely credited with boosting the UFC’s popularity during the promotion’s boom period in the 2000s. Premiering in 2005, the reality show competition featured 16 fighters living together in a house in Las Vegas and competing for a six-figure UFC contract.
The original cast included a litany of future legends and fan favorites, including season winners Forrest Griffin and Diego Sanchez, as well as Stephan Bonnar, Kenny Florian, Josh Koscheck, Chris Leben, Nate Quarry, and Mike Swick. Griffin and Bonnar’s three-round war at the TUF 1 Finale has been embedded in UFC mythos as arguably the most important fight in its history as it served to draw in an unprecedented level of casual interest on free television.
“Craig Piligian is one of the most influential and respected executives in the history of television,” UFC CEO Dana White said in a press release. “Craig was instrumental in shaping The Ultimate Fighter into one of the most important unscripted television shows in sports and helping make UFC a global phenomenon. It will be an honor to induct him into the UFC Hall of Fame this summer.”
Piligian is also known as the creator of reality TV shows American Chopper and Dirty Jobs, and owns an Emmy for his work as a co-producer on Survivor.
When he enters the UFC Hall of Fame Contributor Wing this summer, Piligian he’ll join several other notable behind-the-scenes figures, including former Nevada State Athletic Commission director Marc Ratner (2021), UFC co-creater Art Davie (2018), and infamous matchmaker Joe Silva (2017).
