Lauren Murphy opens up on rift with her Ultimate Fighter 26 coach Eddie Alvarez

It doesn’t seem like Lauren Murphy will be heading to Philadelphia to train with Eddie Alvarez any time soon.

Murphy laid into Alvarez, her The Ultimate Fighter 26 coach, in an expletive-laden interview on Wednesday night’s episode of the reality show, which aired on FS1. Murphy fell in the first round of the TUF 26 women’s flyweight title tournament to Nicco Montaño and was emotional afterward, not coming to Team Alvarez’s training session the morning after the fight.

Alvarez chided Murphy when she got to the afternoon session and, in an interview taped later, Murphy ripped into Alvarez and explained her view of the situation.

“Eddie met me super recently,” Murphy said. “He doesn’t know anything about me. I’m doing my best here and if I need two hours to process the fact that I just blew my shot at the UFC title, like give me two f*cking hours by myself to cry it out and f*cking think about it and miss my husband and miss my kid and figure out how I’m gonna explain to them that I f*cking blew it without somebody like correcting my boxing technique. For two f*cking hours. I don’t think that’s asking so much, I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request the day after I just fought my f*cking ass off in the cage.

“So don’t f*cking get on my ass or send out a bunch of bad energy because I didn’t go out to the gym this f*cking morning when you wanted me to. Like, I should be there immediately. I felt like I got hit by a f*cking bus this morning. F*ck.”

In a phone interview Wednesday with MMA Fighting, Murphy said she couldn’t talk specifically about what happened the rest of the season, which was taped over the summer and will be capped by the live TUF 26 Finale on Dec. 1, but said this was the beginning of a rift between her and Alvarez.

“I was definitely really resentful about it and I was really very envious of the girls on Team Gaethje, because they were allowed to have rest days whenever they wanted, they were having a lot of fun on their team,” Murphy said. “It seemed that their coaches really treated them with a lot of respect and I felt like I was getting the shitty end of that deal, having Eddie as a coach.”

Murphy, a 34-year-old UFC veteran, dropped from bantamweight to flyweight with the UFC adding the new division and crowning a champion on this season’s Ultimate Fighter. Montaño, an underdog seeded No. 14, beat Murphy, seeded No. 3, by unanimous decision in the episode that aired last week.

In an interview on the show, Alvarez addressed the tense situation with Murphy.

“My job as a coach is to keep the morale of the team up,” Alvarez, the former UFC lightweight champion, said in an interview on the show. “Regardless of what goes on, I tell these girls all the time, I don’t care what happens. I care how we react to them. If you have a terrible reaction to a loss or what goes on, you start bringing down the spirit and the morale of the whole team. It’s kind of a selfish thing to do considering there’s eight girls around you depending on you.”

Murphy told MMA Fighting that she was surprised Alvarez said that to the interviewer and not to her, since she told him about the angry interview she gave, so he wouldn’t have to find about it when the show aired. Murphy said she became angrier once she saw what he said on the episode.

“I was blown away,” Murphy said. “I was like, he f*cking said that shit about me? I can’t believe it. That’s crazy to me. I’m the one bringing down morale? Mother f*cker, you’re the one talking shit about me to the rest of the team. I’m quietly sitting at home taking a rest day and you’re talking shit about members of our own team. Who’s really bringing down the morale here? Or to say that those girls depend on me? Depend on me for what? I’m not their coach. You’re their f*cking coach. They’re depending on you.

“I guess part of me feels like it’s cowardly for him to say that to the camera and not be able to say it to my face, because he’s definitely never talked to me like that when the show was filming.”

Murphy, who was very emotional in the interview on the show, said she had no regrets about anything she said or conveyed. The Alaska native has been blogging about the TUF 26 experience on her website.

“I don’t really regret anything I said on the show, to be honest with you,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I could have been a little more articulate. Sometimes I wish I had made my point a little clearer. But I don’t regret anything I said on the show, because everything came from my heart.”

Murphy, who trains out of The MMA Lab in Arizona, said she has still been training and has no plans to give up the sport. She could not say, however, what was next for her.

“I am still training, definitely, and I love to fight,” Murphy said. “There’s some good things in the works coming up and everybody is gonna have to f*cking stay tuned.”